Australia, New Zealand and Federation, 1883-1901 - Section B

This reviews some of the explanations offered by historians.

Three Mega-Explanations: Nationalism, Defence and Race

At this point, it might seem more productive to
stand back from the detailed contents of our box of time and seek to explain Australian
federation through three mega-explanatory factors, each of them big enough to
sweep aside exceptions and quibbles. The three are Australian nationalism,
defence and the White Australia policy. They can each be dealt with fairly
briefly and relatively irreverently, thanks largely to the brilliant
revisionist study of the years 1889 to 1910 by Ron Norris in his book, The Emergent Commonwealth.1
But before abandoning ourselves to the delights of historical agnosticism, we
should consider a methodological reservation. It can be plausibly contended
that neither nationalism nor defence nor White Australia can be identified as
the "smoking gun", the trigger cause that crucially drove Australians
into the acceptance of political union. Yet each and all of these
mega-explanations may have acted in a more general, contextual way:
"factors" is the mealy-mouthed term used by historians to classify
arguments too obvious to be omitted but too implausible to be identified as
"causes".2 Somebody voting at a referendum might be the
more inclined to accept more practical arguments in favour of federation
because they had been put forward within an atmosphere of national pride in a
future united Australia, or of communal unease about the dangers of immigration
from Asia. "Establish the Commonwealth
of Australasia,"
Josiah Symon told a gathering of South Australian federalists, "and they
would have a place in the eye of civilization which it had not entered into the
heart of man to conceive."3 Rhetoric of this kind might not in
itself win a single vote, but such a flight of fancy would hardly have made
sense unless the orator felt sure that his audience would treat such sentiments
with respect.

"Nationalism"
in Australia
has traditionally been a milder sentiment than in most of the rest of the
world. Indeed, when Richard Jebb, nephew of an Edinburgh professor, wrote of "colonial
nationalism", he was flirting with oxymoron, the pairing of irreconcilable
opposites, to an extent which has been overlooked by the subsequent co-option
of his phrase into the textbooks.
(Indeed, Jebb himself was sceptical about its practical effectiveness.
"The Australian federalist", he wrote in 1905, "may be excused
if he is inclined to exaggerate the force of spontaneous nationalism".)4
An "Australian Nationalist", stated a writer of 1888, was "one
who looks forward to seeing this Continent the seat of a united and independent
Nation".5 "Why should not the name of an Australian be
equal to that of a Briton?", Parkes asked in 1890, as he criticised the
sentimental use of the term "Home" to describe those distant islands
off the north-west coast of Europe. This was fine rhetoric, if perhaps a trifle
inconsistent coming from Henry Parkes, with his two British knighthoods and his
endless name-dropping of famous contacts in the old country.6
Newspaper reports demonstrate that such sentiments were loudly cheered at
public meetings, but that does not prove that they were conclusive in
marshalling support for federation. In fact, there are two areas of complication
and two of objection that considerably undercut the argument for the causal
significance of Australian nationalism.

The
first of the complications was identified by Norris: if Australian nationalism
was a force behind federation, then it would be necessary to conclude that
Victorians and Tasmanians, who voted overwhelmingly for the Commonwealth Bill,
were more nationalistic than the far less enthusiastic populations of New South
Wales and Queensland.7 One sub-plot identifies the miners of Charters
Towers and Kalgoorlie as unusually "Australian", simply because they
were jumbled-together communities that had arrived from other parts of the
continent in very recent times. It was North Queensland that counterbalanced
the hostility to federation of the Brisbane
area, while in Western Australia,
the gold-miners were familiarly known as "T'othersiders". Some
scholars have speculated that we may find here an Australian adaptation of the
theories of Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued that the United States became distinctively
"American" thanks to the democratic crucible of its moving frontier.
Unluckily, the continent's other great mining centre, at Broken Hill, voted
solidly against federation, so shattering more than one plausible interpretation.8

The
second complication is the one that tends to identify nationalism with
nativism. The term "native" had acquired a double resonance at least
half a century before federation: implicitly, it outbid the claim of Black
Australians to ownership of the land, relegating them to a pluperfect prologue
of an "Aboriginal" world.9 It was an assertion designed to
counteract the assumption that external (that is to say, British) influences
were correct, while their local manifestations were debased and inferior. Demographically,
by the eighteen-nineties, Australia
was moving more firmly into the "native" column. In 1891, 2.17
million people had been born in Australia,
against 830,000 in Britain
and Ireland.
By 1901, the balance was tipping sharply: there were 2.9 million locally born
against 685,000 British and Irish migrants.10 Hence Deakin could
announce in 1898 that a "united Australia ... can only come to be with the
consent of and by the efforts of the Australian-born".
11

Yet to argue this was far
from proving that the Australian
Commonwealth was the
product of victory of native over newcomer. Immigrants were much more strongly
represented among the adult population, as can be seen from the biographies of
the delegates to the various federal conventions. In 1891, almost one and a
half million Australians were under the age of twenty, and these were
overwhelmingly native-born; by 1901, this youth cohort had grown by 200,000.
The immigrant surges of the gold-rush years might be dying off, but their
places as adult citizens and voters had yet to be filled from Australia's fecund cradles. The
modest extent of the shift of influence towards the native-born is suggested by
a comparison of the birth-places of participants in the 1891 Convention with
those of 1897-98. In 1891, 17 delegates had been born in Australia, as against 25 overseas.
(Three New Zealanders, all overseas-born, are omitted from the calculation.) By
1897-98, the balance had shifted, with 29 locally born delegates compared with
25 from overseas. In one respect, the classification is not especially helpful:
nine of the immigrants had arrived in Australia before the age of ten and
may be assumed to have shared the world picture of their cornstalk
contemporaries. The dedicated federalist John Quick, for instance, had left Cornwall as a baby.

Even a cursory survey is
sufficient to cast doubt on any hypothesis that might link the coming of
federation with the triumph of the Australian-born. The two colonies to
register the largest "swing" towards choosing native-born delegates
between the conventions of 1891 and 1897 were New South Wales (which went from
4-3 to 7-3) and Western Australia, where the balance changed from 3-4 to 9-5.
Neither can be described as forming part of the vanguard of the movement,
whereas Tasmania,
which shifted in the other direction (3-4 in 1891; 3-7 in 1897-98) was
fervently in the federalist camp.12 In any case, why should we
assume that the native-born were more likely to be "Australian" than
the immigrants? The latter had uprooted themselves from their homelands to make
their lives on a southern continent; only a minority among the former had ever
been forced to interrogate their identification with the separate colony in
which they were born. Perhaps the most apparently "Australian" of all
the delegates was William Lyne of New
South Wales. Born and raised in Tasmania,
he had tried his luck in the Queensland
Gulf country before eventually
settling down as a pastoralist in the Upper Murray,
one of the border regions usually described as chafing against the
artificiality of colonial boundaries. Unfortunately, Lyne was a determined
opponent of Australian federation.

Why,
then, should a politician so shrewd as Deakin have engaged in a sentiment that
risked alienating a powerful section of the continent's voters? The answer lies
in the fact that he was addressing a meeting of the Australian Natives'
Association. "The history of the A.N.A.", its President proclaimed at
that same gathering, "... was the history of the federation movement."13
In reality, we might invert the conventional textbook link and suggest that,
far from federation having been masterminded by the Australian Natives'
Association, it was rather that the ANA had piggy-backed upon the closer union
sentiment to raise its own profile. The origins of the ANA could be traced back
to a small friendly society formed in 1871 to provide welfare support and pay
medical bills to its exclusively male membership, a riposte by the locally-born
to the miscellany of St Andrew's and St Patrick's Associations that fostered
fellowship and nostalgia for distant homelands. "It has never been a
Victorian, but always an Australian Association," Deakin claimed in 1898.
If so, the rest of Australia
did not seem to have been aware of the fact. By 1890, it had a membership of
7,400, all but a few hundred of them living in Victoria. There the Natives, with their
motto "Australia
for the Australians", undoubtedly provided the cause of federation with a
grass-roots network of enthusiasts.14

When
the ANA sought to take its message to other colonies, the results were
discouraging. In New South Wales,
native birth probably remained subconsciously associated with convict
parentage. In 1885 a branch was reported to have been established in Mudgee,
which is a fine town but not the most obvious launch-pad for a social and
political movement. A successful foothold in Sydney had to wait another three years.
Indeed, the ANA portrayed its infiltration of the mother colony in terms
calculated to arouse New South Welsh suspicions. "The great body of
native-born electors in the Riverina should be aroused to a sense of the
possibilities that may follow their co-operation with brother
Australians", announced the annual report for 1894, proudly adding that
"the Victorian Association has pierced its way to Berrigan in New South
Wales".15 Berrigan is
not a long way inside New South Wales. In South Australia, a handful of branches
sprang up between 1887 and 1890, along with a parallel organisation, the Wattle
Blossom League, for native-born women and immigrant wives. At its peak, South
Australian membership was about 600, but the depression of the early
eighteen-nineties destroyed the infant movement outside Adelaide itself. Even there, the branch
collapsed in 1896, despite having resorted to the desperate expedient of
extending associate membership to non-native males. The South Australia ANA
began to revive from 1900 onwards. The negative correlation with the peaks of
popular involvement in the federation movement from 1897 to 1899 is indeed
striking.16 Tasmania
was another colony where enthusiasm for federation evidently exceeded support
for the ANA. "The most cheering news comes from Hobart",
the Association announced in 1894, merely because sympathisers there had sent a
request across the Bass Strait for help to organise a branch.17 Tasmania was already
strongly pro-federal. It had by far the lowest percentage immigrant population
of any Australian colony - not to mention a profound
sensitivity about ancestry. Fundamentally, the ANA sought to steer the concept
of a national identity against the mainstream of Australian democratic
thinking. "By the term Australian we mean not those who have been merely
born in Australia,"
remarked the Bulletin in 1887.
"All white men who come to these shores - with a clean record - and who leave behind them the memory of the
class-distinctions and the religious differences of the old world ... are
Australian."18

However,
the Bulletin's definition of an
Australian identity defined not by birthplace but by shared egalitarian (though
racist) values leads us to the first of the major objections to the assumption
that federation was the product of nationalism. For the Bulletin, the true overseas-born Australians were those who placed
"the advancement of their adopted country before the interests of
Imperialism". The ANA may have talked of waving "the flag of the
United States of Australia", but no major figure in the federation
movement talked (or even, one suspects, dreamed) of independence from the
British empire.19 At federalist rallies, the most popular song was Rule Britannia!20 "Loud
and continued cheers" greeted the peroration of a speech by Victorian
Premier Sir George Turner at St Kilda in 1898, when he called for "a
powerful federation - a noble Commonwealth, under
that flag which we all respected and revered, the grand old Union Jack". Applause punctuated George Reid's
"Yes-No" speech when he assured his audience that federation was
"to be a union under the Crown".21

From the perspective of Edinburgh one hundred years later, it is possible to
speculate whether such rhetoric was a forerunner of the tactical ambiguity of
the Scottish Nationalist slogan, "Independence
in Europe". But a radical Tasmanian
opponent of the "fetteration" scheme anticipated another slogan of
the nineteen-nineties, that of Australia's
republican movement, when he objected that the governor-general of the
Commonwealth would be an imperial appointment and probably a British
aristocrat. "Thus federated Australia cannot even anticipate
the position being filled by an Australian. So much for the alleged
Nation!"22 Nor was this the product of oversight. An attempt to
persuade the Bathurst Convention to endorse the idea of electing a
governor-general by popular vote was rejected by "an almost unanimous
vote". In doing so, Thomas MacHattie reported, the delegates were showing
"their appreciation of the benefits which Australians receive ... [as part
of] the greatest Empire of the world".23

It is possible to
reinterpret Australian enthusiasm for the empire, as Keith Sinclair did for New Zealand
attitudes towards imperial federation, as a surrogate form of local
nationalism. Even so, it remains noteworthy that the form should have been
merely surrogate. Alfred Deakin may be
accused of special pleading when he assured Lord Hopetoun in 1897 that there
was "not one" Australian politician who was "favourable to any
severance of the ties that unite us - or rather it does not need
ties - we feel united - we feel one & are determined to remain
one". Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee had exercised "a powerful effect here in reawakening the
sense of Imperial unity & of national pride. I for one have never hesitated
to point out upon the public platform that Australian federation is the
necessary preliminary to closer political relationships throughout the
Empire."24 Similarly, it is possible to agree with La Nauze's
carefully qualified suggestion that "the fortuitous coincidence of the
Boer War with the attainment of Australian national union provided emotionally
some kind of substitute for a real war of independence".25 But
even this gloss upon popular enthusiasm for the conflict in South Africa risks
rewriting the reality of imperial sentiment, as the handful of brave opponents
of the war could testify. Henry Bournes Higgins lost his seat in the Victorian
parliament, Professor G.A. Wood came close to forfeiting his Chair at Sydney
University.26 As the South Australian contingent marched to the
docks, Adelaide's leading newspaper claimed that "their departure for the
Transvaal proclaims to the world the priceless truth that the silken cords
still tightly bind the Austral daughter to her mother England".27
That was written in November 1899, five months after South Australians had
endorsed federation by a majority of almost four-to-one. In 1905, it was the
Australian premiers who insisted that Empire Day should be celebrated as a
public holiday "to imbue children with the Imperial sentiment" - in the words of one Sydney journalist, to be
taught to "look up to the one flag as they do to the one sun".28
In August 1914, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher (another Ayrshire Scot) pledged
that Australians would defend Britain to
their last man and their last shilling and even the Bulletin burst into imperial song:

For Britain!
Good old Britain!

Where our fathers first drew breath,

We'll fight like true Australians,

Facing danger, wounds or death.29

We should not discount patriotic and nativist
sentiments as a motivating and organising force that helps to explain the role
played by at least some the activists in the movement. But it would be a
distortion to categorise nationalism as a major explanation for the movement
for closer union. It would also perpetuate a misleading notion of Australian
nationalism itself.

The
second major area of objection to an association between federation and
nationalism is that it implies that a popular upsurge of pan-Australian
sentiment took the form of a movement for political and constitutional change.
"A national movement?", the sceptical George Reid had scornfully
asked in 1891. "No!" Pressure for federation was "confined to
the great ambitious statesmen of Australia", manoeuvrings which
Reid insisted were no substitute for "a great national, manly outburst of
feeling!"30 In 1894, the radical Bulletin complained that there was little sign of any such uprising
of popular feeling: "nine-tenths of the population takes no real interest
in the future Australian nation ..., in the marble metropolis which is to be the
political centre of the Commonwealth, or in any of the other abstract glories
of a united Australia."31
It is true that international cricket was well established by 1900, with 56
"test" matches between Australia
and England,
the adjective itself suggesting a trial of nascent national identity. Australia
had won twenty, including four matches of the five-test series that overlapped
with the Federal Convention of 1897-98. However, we should recall the failure
of the West Indies federation at the time when Sobers, Kanhai and Hunte were
inspiring cricket-crazy Caribbean crowds with
their batting. Italian unity has sometimes been portrayed as a mass explosion
by a people determined to break the bounds of petty principalities, and the
Risorgimento did indeed take place within a very short span of time. As we have
already seen, Australia's
federal movement was both drawn-out and low-key, and its leaders seem to have
been reconciled to a quarrelsome long-haul. "There will be more Playfords
and more Lee Steeres," Parkes wrote wearily to Deakin after encountering
two obstructives from the smaller colonies at Sydney in 1890, "and we shall be
fortunate if we do not meet more awkward creatures than either." Affable
Alfred defended the two back-sliders, arguing that they were questioning
"the conditions and not the wisdom or necessity of federating".32
But by the time the Commonwealth finally came into being a decade later, Deakin
was less sanguine. "Not even an Act of the Imperial Parliament can remove
by its fiat the antagonisms of thought, aim and situation existing among the
scattered four millions of Independent Australian Britons", he told
British newspaper readers. Australia was about to inaugurate its federal
constitution, "but everything that could make the union it establishes more
than a mere piece of political carpentry will remain to be accomplished
afterwards".33 As d'Azeglio was reported to have said forty
years earlier, those who had made Italy must now make Italians. A growing sense
of national identity and pride made Australian federation possible, but it did
not make it happen.

What,
then, of the argument that federation was a response to external crisis, driven
by the need to improve Australian defence? Defence was certainly a persistent
theme in the stop-start movements towards federation: 1883-85 was almost
entirely a response to German and French incursions into the New Guinea/South
Pacific region, while some textbooks relate that the Tenterfield speech was
triggered by the recommendation of a visiting British officer that the colonies
federate for military purposes.34 Yet these were the initiatives
that failed; indeed, the Federal Council, which was inspired almost totally by
a perceived crisis in defence, is often held to have failed most completely. We
should note, too, that the nature of the threat varied. Warning of Russian
ambitions in Manchuria, China's teeming millions and the "intelligent,
vigorous, brave, adaptable" people of Japan, Symon told South Australians
in 1895 that if they delayed taking action, "we might wake up with the
whole of eastern Asia thundering at our gates, and we would federate when
perhaps it might be too late".35 In 1897, Barton was looking
further afield, telling a reporter that "the critical situation of affairs
among the great Powers is acting as an inducement to union". This was
Barton playing the role of the responsible statesman. It was better, he argued,
to be united and prepared than to federate "at a stage where there will be
little time for preparation, and, therefore, more risk of pillage and
bloodshed".36 What was consistent was the rhetoric. "In
the providence of God," a Sydney clergyman told his flock in 1898,
"Federation is being forced upon us by the danger which lies without,
coupled with the vast interests which lie within".37 Those who
opposed federation were thus simultaneously defying divine providence and
positively inviting invaders to plunder and pillage. These were impressive
tactical ploys, but they do not amount to historical explanations.

For
instance, in 1889 Henry Parkes was already turning his mind to the issue of
federation, as he did from time to time, before Major General Bevan Edwards had
even begun his inspection of Australian defences.38 In any case, the
general's recommendations were military, not political. "A common system
of defence can only be carried out by a federation of the military forces of
the Colonies, each State agreeing to organize its forces on the same system,
although they may continue to pay and maintain them separately."39
There was no more need for political union in 1889 than there had been two
years earlier, when the colonies had collectively agreed to co-operate with the
British in establishing a common naval squadron. It was Parkes who insisted
that "if they were to carry out the recommendations of General Edwards, it
would be absolutely necessary for them to have something more than the Federal
Council - one central executive
authority, which could bring all the forces of the different colonies into one
national army".40

Narrative accounts of the
coming of federation tend to take for granted that the assumption that the
Edwards-Parkes analysis was inherently persuasive. It did not capture the
veteran New South Wales
politician, Sir John Robertson, who hated to utter a polite word about his colony's
southern neighbour. "The only excuse put forward for our
self-abasement", he announced in an anti-federal diatribe in February
1890, "is that a travelling soldier said ... that we might require assistance from Victoria
and South Australia!
As if in time of war they would not have more than enough to do to protect
their own shores!"41 Some continued to assume that federation
was unnecessary to secure an Australasian alliance. As George Reid put it in
1898, "even if we were disunited, as we are today, it would equally be our
duty in our own interests to throw all our strength to the rescue of any colony
that was blighted by invasion".42 Jack Want saw no need to hurry political
union in advance of crisis: "time enough to federate when danger
threatens".43 It was to counter attitudes of this kind that Sir
John Downer lectured South Australians: "the time has gone by when sudden
preparations could be made effectively, and this was a great and solid argument
for Federation."44

However persuasive the
defence argument may appear in the textbooks, Parkes and his military ally did
not succeed in sweeping Australians into political union. Norris dismisses the
case for labelling Edwards as the modern Major-General from The Pirates of Penzance, but there was
something Gilbertian about his intrigue with Parkes, from whom he almost
certainly derived the highly debatable term "federation". From his
base in Hong Kong, Edwards dreamed and
schemed. He even thought of persuading the admiral in command of the Chinese
fleet to make a "goodwill" visit to Australian waters. "Would
that not help your federation?", he asked the veteran New South Wales premier. If an external
threat was required to spur federation, it would seem that in the last resort,
one might be invented.45 Later, some federalists took the
high-minded position that their movement had not required any such device. The
Bathurst Convention in 1896 was assured that it could be "calm and
collected" in its deliberations, precisely because no external threat existed.
In 1901, Sir John Cockburn boasted that the Commonwealth of Australia had
"the distinction of being the first instance of a union of States as a
result of the forces of cohesion, without the application of any external
compulsion".46

Norris
demonstrated that when the federalists turned from rhetoric to negotiation,
defence virtually dropped from sight. One recent historian, Luke Trainor, has
argued that the overt absence of the defence argument is in itself significant.
"Not all concealment is ideology but the concept does involve a deception
whereby some contradictions are obscured and with them, the class interests
they serve. There are inversions involved whereby 'defence' means attack and
'defence forces' can be directed inwards against those who pay for them."47
Trainor evidently has in mind embittered labour memories of the use of local
militia to quell the strikes of the early eighteen-nineties, forever associated
with the notorious order, "Fire low and lay them out".48
If working men held aloof from the movement partly because they feared that
"Federal soldiers will be ordered to fire low and the workers will be
crushed",49 then of course it made sense to play down any such
aspect of the scheme. But is the absence of discussion in itself enough to bear
out Trainor's suspicions?

The
eighteen-nineties was a decade of economic slump and government retrenchment.
Thus another reason for down-playing the defence issue was that armaments cost
money, at a time when colonial governments were slashing their already-small
military expenditure. In the 1898 South Australian referendum, one anti-Billite
warned that federation would saddle taxpayers with the cost of Victoria's
"obsolete defences".50 Yet concealment does not seem to be
the explanation for the virtual absence of allusions to defence in the
principal pro-federation manifestos analysed by Norris. The Braddon clause, the
mechanism that forced the Commonwealth to return surplus revenue to the States,
was supported by South Australia's F.W. Holder precisely because he wished to
have a "safeguard" to prevent the Commonwealth from incurring
"heavy naval and military expenditure".51 One exasperated
federalist claimed that some politicians would only wake up to the dangers they
faced when a shell exploded in Adelaide's King William Street.52
Evidently, Holder managed to find other reasons why his province should join a
united Australia.

Despite
Holder's fears, it cannot be said that the new regime rushed into grandiose
military projects. It was necessary to find a place for Queensland in the first cabinet, although
its politicians had stood aloof from the culmination of the federation
movement. When the premier, Glasgow-born Sir Robert Philp, refused to leave Brisbane, the Queensland
slot went to another Scot, James Dickson, a one-time pupil of the Glasgow High School. The fact that Dickson
received the portfolio of defence does not suggest that this was to be the new
government's highest priority. When Dickson suddenly died early in 1901, his
place was taken by another representative of the continental fringe, Western Australia's
Forrest. In the early years of the Commonwealth, the watchwords for defence
policy were continuity and economy. "Extravagant expenditure will be
avoided, and reliance will be placed ... in our citizen soldiery", the first
ministry announced in its speech from the throne.53 In London, The Times had acknowledged that one of
the reasons for federation was that Australians "have come to know that
they are not as safe from the designs of foreign Powers as they used to imagine
in days not long gone by". No doubt The
Times gloss on the implications of these fears was as slanted on the one
side as were the alarmist warnings of shells falling on King William Street on
the other, but it probably tells us more about the apparent complacency with
which the Commonwealth assumed its defence obligations. "They
understand," concluded The Times,
"that it is the British command of the seas which renders Australia as safe from naval attack as the Isle of Wight."54 In June 1905, Deakin
gave a newspaper interview in which he warned that Australia's coastal cities
were vulnerable to sudden attack: the Commonwealth was four years old and
Deakin himself had already served one term, albeit brief, as prime minister.55
It was not until 1909 that the decision was taken to establish the Royal
Australian Navy, in the very different international atmosphere of an arms race
between Britain and Germany, and under the inspiration of a goodwill visit, not
by the Chinese, but from America's "Great White Fleet" in 1908.56

Closely
linked to the postulated motive of defence as the issue of the White Australia
policy. Here, surely, we have the clinching evidence for the driving force
behind the movement for federation. "No motive power operated more
universally ... [and] more powerfully in dissolving the technical and arbitrary
political divisions which previously separated us than the desire that we
should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other
races", said Deakin in defence of the Immigration Restriction Bill of
1901. Norris argues that this was good parliamentary rhetoric, but a poor guide
to the actual motives behind the campaign for federation.57 Indeed,
there are three major objections to the "White Australia"
explanation. First, the separate
colonies had already closed the door on immigration from Asia.
Secondly, neither the negotiations for federation nor the enthusiasts who
campaigned in its favour made more than passing appeals to conventional
Australian racism. Thirdly, some opponents of the scheme alleged that political
union would simply open the rest of the continent to Queensland's
existing Pacific Islands labour force.

The
six Australian governments had met at Sydney
in March 1896 where they agreed to extend existing anti-Chinese legislation
against all non-white immigration. However, W.K. Hancock argued that
legislation by the separate colonies "was not enough ... they found it
difficult to close every gap through which unwelcome immigrants might squeeze".58
This is a splendid example - and from one of Australia's
greatest historians - of the way in which words
can be used to conjure up an absurdity. The notion of thousands of Asians
tip-toeing along the dotted lines of Australia's artificial colonial
boundaries surely belongs more to the world of Monty Python's Flying Circus than to the pages of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. As Norris ironically remarks, ten alien
migrants "invaded" South Australia between 1899 and 1901, and 133 had
"swarmed" into the Northern Territory - not quite replacing the 151
who had left.59 The first case of leprosy in South Australia
coincided with the 1898 referendum campaign, and occurred in the Chinese ghetto
of working-class West Adelaide. Norris reports that, despite a public outcry,
nobody linked the case of Wah Lee to federation in any way at all. Moreover, West Adelaide, which contained almost half the colony's
Chinese population, was one of the only two electorates to reject the Bill at the 1898 referendum. Of its qualified (i.e.
white) voters, just three in every twenty turned out to support federation.60 White Australia, in short, was simply
taken for granted. Hence in his notorious "Yes-No" speech, Reid could
dismiss "dealing with the coloured races" and "the external
affairs of Australia" as "matters of detail", along with posts,
telegraphs and naturalisation of aliens, which he felt able to pass over in
silence. Hence, too, nobody was troubled by the irony that the opening ceremony
for the first Commonwealth parliament could begin with the singing of The Old
Hundredth, a solemn hymn that opens with an invocation of "All People That
On Earth Do Dwell".61

Of
course, Billites did issue appeals to the principle of White Australia.
"Federation is the only possible means of preserving Australia to the
White Races", claimed the Sydney
Morning Herald (in passing, so Norris insists).62 "United
the Colonies will be in a strong position to resist the encroachment of
coloured and inferior peoples", remarked a country paper on the New South
Wales north coast, "where", it added, in further repudiation of
political correctness, "the black and yellow agony is so acutely
felt".63 However, they did not monopolise the race card: other
voices argued the case in reverse. Equal representation in the Senate, warned
one Sydney
pamphleteer, "will lead to the importation, upon a large scale, of colored
labour, and, as a result, civil war". Senators from the three outer
mainland colonies would unite, probably in alliance with their conservative
allies from the south-eastern States, to ensure cheap labour to develop a
plantation economy across tropical Australia. "No doubt we in the
south would demand the restriction of the use of colored labour to the extreme
north" but its use would eventually spread "even south of the tropic
of Capricorn".64 It was an argument that persuaded some New
Zealanders to keep their Australian cousins at arm's length. "They will
find the force of circumstances too much for them", one witness assured the
New Zealand Royal Commission: " ... we have a compact population of
Europeans here and we should keep it so."65

Unlike
the Kiwis, Scott Bennett was inclined to regard such anti-federation arguments
as irrational.66 No doubt a proposal for major constitutional change
can be expected to bring out hag-ridden fears of conspiracy and doom. Of
greater weight were the assumptions, certainly among some federalists in South Australia and Queensland, that political union would do
nothing to impede the exploitation of their northern resources by non-white
labour. The issue was of muted importance in the former, where there was a
general desire to dump the costly incubus of its Northern Territory on the Commonwealth
government, a transfer that was eventually achieved in 1911. (The Territory's
white minority was more than willing to be off-loaded.)67 None the
less, there remained an element of ambiguity in South Australian attitudes to
the tropical North.68 More striking was the support for federation
in north Queensland, where the sugar economy was dependent upon imported labour
from the Pacific Islands. Indeed, Samuel Griffith, the chief influence behind
the 1891 draft constitution, defended the inclusion of control over non-white
immigration among the federal powers. The "probability", he assured
the Queensland government, was that an Australian parliament "would
decline to do any act that might inflict disaster on any part of the Continent
merely in obedience to a popular cry".69 In its first decade,
the Commonwealth government did succeed in repatriating (or, more bluntly,
deporting) most of the non-white workforce from the cane fields, but
subsidising the alternative of European labour proved to be an expensive
operation. There is inadequate evidence to prove that the federation movement
was driven by any single imperative in relation to non-white labour in Queensland.

What,
then, are we to make of Deakin's celebrated dictum that Australians were
inspired to federate by their desire to form "one people and remain one
people without the admixture of other races"? A century later, and from
the perspective of a Scotland
recently embarked upon legislative devolution, it is possible to suggest that a
new parliament is exceptionally vulnerable in its first year or two of operation.
Where the referendum is used, voters must be shaken from their preferred state
of apathy by impressing upon them that they face vast challenges which require
a fundamental change in the structure of government. Eventually, the new
parliament convenes. Voters soon realise that it cannot produce miracles
overnight, and disappointment sets in. Eight months after the first meeting of
the Commonwealth parliament, Patrick Glynn privately commented that it was
"more than possible" that if Australians were given an opportunity
for second thoughts on federation, "the vote would be against the
union". For the new Commonwealth of Australia, the appearance of taking
action to restrict immigration offered a tempting combination of large
political returns for small legislative input.70

Signs of the Times?: Communications and Conflict

Nationalism, defence, White Australia - the overarching explanations beloved of the
textbooks each and all seem to crumble when scrutinised more closely. It would
seem that we have no alternative but to return to our box of time, however
defined, and see just what was going on in those two decades before 1901, in
the hope of identifying the pressures that led Australians to federate. Yet
here again we encounter insoluble enigmas of historical methodology. Professor
Frank Crowley performed many great services to the study of Australian history,
but perhaps the most enjoyable of them all are the volumes of his Documentary History of Australia, of
which Volume 3 covers the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Well over two
hundred episodes are chronicled for the years from 1883 onwards, and even then
we may suspect that this splendid anthology of colonial life has only skimmed
the surface. Of course, common sense tells us that some of the vignettes can be
discarded from any attempt to identify the causes of federation. The admission
of women to Melbourne University, fires in Gippsland, floods in Brisbane - each of these gives us something of the
flavour of the time, but none of them will strike us as likely candidates to
constitute the explanation that we seek. It was an inventive era of technical
change. The first typewriter had arrived as far back as 1883, the year the
railway lines met at Albury, and by the end of the nineties, it was catching on
fast: is there a subconscious association to be confronted here - typewriters, bureaucracy, federal
government? Those who designed the new system of government were certainly
aware of the potential. The 1891 Federal Convention had even attempted to deal
with jurisdiction over wireless communications. This was a remarkable
constitutional innovation, since in 1891 wireless had not yet been invented.
However, the Professor of Physics at Sydney University had assured Griffith
that it was only a matter of time, and federal control over "the
transmission of information by any natural power" was duly inserted into
the document.1 In 1896, as the movement for federation was gearing
up for its final burst, the first moving pictures were shown in Australia and
the first motor car was imported.

The
same common sense that tells us to discard female students and horseless
carriages from our provisional list of causes may mislead us into assuming that
this negative process of selection has conferred upon the episodes that have
survived the initial trawl at least a prima
facie claim to be considered as contributory explanations. Having got so
far in the process, these "causes" may start to attract shreds of
supporting evidence in much the same way that flypaper collects dead insects.
At the very least, we must show the same relentless agnosticism towards
hypotheses suggesting causal links between federation and contemporary events
that Ron Norris has displayed towards the grand explanatory theories that we have
already discarded. We can at least arrange possible contemporary influences
into five categories: environmental crisis, technological change (typewriters
excepted), social conflict, financial investment and commercial opportunity.
The first three may be dismissed relatively easily. The fourth and fifth take
us deep into the economic motive, that fundamental but largely immeasurable
aspect of the human condition.

Between
1895 and 1903, Australia
endured the longest drought in its modern history. Is it mere coincidence that
the greatest environmental crisis of European settlement should have coincided
with the final push to achieve the most fundamental constitutional
reorganisation of the continent? Any causal relationship must presumably be
subtle, since in those days nobody believed that human activity could affect
weather patterns. Even the imported English game of cricket failed to perform
its legendary function as a rain-making ceremony under Australian skies.2
At a direct and practical level, the drought added to the tensions between
rival colonial interests further to complicate negotiations at the Convention
of 1897-98. Arid Australia
has only one river capable of functioning as an internal waterway. For much of
its course, the Murray forms the boundary
between Victoria and New
South Wales, but for its last 150 miles, it flows entirely within South Australia before half-heartedly dribbling into the Indian Ocean. In order to generate even the shallow flow
required to support paddlesteamers, the Murray
relied upon its tributaries, notably the Murrumbidgee
and the Darling. Both of these flowed (when they flowed, which in the case of
the Darling was not every year) entirely within New South Wales, traversing some very dry country. Among the
exciting technological prospects of the eighteen-nineties was the hope that the
interior might be opened up through irrigation: there was a time when Alfred
Deakin was as well known for his 1886 Victorian Irrigation Act as for his
enthusiasm for federation. In New
South Wales, George Reid insisted that the water from
the three rivers was "vitally required if ever this great country is to be
thickly peopled". Unfortunately, the very fact that water was so scarce
meant that there was a conflict between the interests of outback farmers in New South Wales and the Murray River trade, which was
important to South Australia.
Reid, who rather specialised in troubled waters, accused the South Australians
of wishing to turn his own colony into a mere catchment area.3

Eventually, after "the
most exhausting debate of the whole Convention", the problem was solved,
or rather dodged, by guaranteeing to individual States "the reasonable use
of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation".4 Everything, of course, would depend upon the
interpretation of the word "reasonable". South Australians like Symon
grumbled that they had been given the river but not the water; New South Wales anti-Billites accused Adelaide
of ambitions to take over the Blue Mountains.
By 1902, the issue of water use in the Murray
valley had reached a crisis point. Federation, it seemed, was irrelevant to the
problem. New South Wales, South
Australia and Victoria
established a joint Royal Commission, just as if an Australian central
government still did not exist. The most they could agree upon was a series of
inter-government meetings to co-ordinate policy. However, the three States did
silently unite in a common stance on one occasion. In 1904, the Commonwealth
government suggested that the whole issue of control over the Murray waters be transferred to the federal
sphere. None of the three State governments bothered to respond.5 As
sometimes happens with tempestuous political issues, time proved to be a mighty
healer. The riverboat had no real future. Perhaps there is a causal connection
at some profound level between the ecological crisis of the drought and the
political revolution of the Australian
Commonwealth. All that
can be said is that in practical terms, the fight over water resources added
one more complication on the road to federation, and one that there is little
reason to think that anybody seriously expected federation would solve.

Writing
in 1884, an enthusiast for federation accepted that it "would have been
impossible 20 years ago" simply because communications were inadequate.
"But science has given us in the steamboat and the railway a new organism,
and in the electric telegraph a new nervous system."6 In truth,
the steamboat was already past its peak. Echuca on the Murray owed its boom
status as Australia's "toy New Orleans"7 to its rail link
to Melbourne, and other lines were tapping in, both from Victoria and from New
South Wales, to sap the river trade. As K.S. Inglis has shown, Australians
eagerly embraced the telegraph and there was little disagreement that it should
become a federal responsibility. However, that is not to claim that the
telegraph made political union necessary. The Pacific cable, for instance, the
all-British route to Europe by way of Canada,
was planned at a conference held in Ottawa
in 1894 and inaugurated in 1902, an example of the separate Australian colonies
collaborating in the external sphere. As a possible explanation for federation,
something might be made of the fact that, by the eighteen-nineties, cheaper
telegraph rates and greater reliability of service had given London a dominant position in Australian
investment markets. However, Luke Trainor, the historian who has most recently
sought to interweave the Imperial and Australian stories, places little
emphasis upon this aspect of potential financial control.8 Perhaps
we should not make too much of communications as a basis for intercolonial
harmony. Adelaide, Melbourne
and Sydney had
been linked by telegraph as far back as 1858. "I rejoice at the shortening
of the distance between us," the governor of New South Wales had wired his Victorian and
South Australian counterparts. But when a New South Wales
customs officer made a nuisance of himself in the river port
of Echuca in 1864, the Victorian
police used the telegraph to secure authority from Melbourne to threaten him with arrest.9
Nor did the communications revolution come with a rush. The telephone was slow
to catch on: Sydney had a telephone exchange by
1882, but there was no connection to Melbourne
until 1907.

That
leaves us with the railways. There is a splendid ambiguity in the connection
between federation and the extension of the railway network. Did railways sweep
away the divisions between the colonies and bring about federation, or was
federation necessary to bring about the full integration of the new transport
system? As early as 1880, the governor of New South Wales was predicting that
"the extension of the railway" would advance the federal cause by
making clear the need for uniform commercial legislation.10 James
Service put the point in more forceful imagery, assuring the assembled diners
in the engine shed at Albury that there was "nothing like the cow catcher
on the locomotive engine to sweep away material obstacles and local
prejudices". Noel McLachlan cites Service's imagery as part of his
explanation for the achievement of federation.11 There is, however,
a problem with chronology: true, Australia has never developed a
high-speed rail network, but it does seem odd that it took Service's cow-catcher
seventeen years to nudge aside those artificial dotted lines that separated the
colonies.

It might seem more plausible
to invert the postulated causal relationship, arguing rather that federation
was required to remove obstacles to the destiny of the locomotive. It is one of
the clichés of Australian history that the continent's railways were built to
different gauges. Unfortunately for this line of argument, it is by no means
clear either that the different systems constituted a serious problem, or that
the fragmented railway network constituted in any sense a reason for
federation. It inspired a certain amount of rhetoric, as at Albury in 1883, and
provided some federalist ammunition. General Bevan Edwards in 1889 had insisted
that "a uniform gauge must be established - at all events on the
through lines".12 Nothing was done. Manning Clark, a Melburnian
exiled in Canberra,
might write feelingly of "Albury station on a windy night",13
but the truth was that the break of gauge was a problem that few experienced.
There was little enough intercolonial travel.14 Most passengers and
almost all inter-colonial freight travelled by sea. For those who did travel by
rail, there were advantages in breaking the journey at Albury, especially in
the early years when on-board train facilities were minimal.15 The
plain fact was that in Australia,
railways were not intended to foster cross-border travel. In this, Australia differed from South Africa, where one of the incentives for
establishing a strong central government was the need to direct the trade of
the wealthy Transvaal to the ports of Cape Town
and Durban,
rather than allow it to follow its natural and shortest route through
Portuguese East Africa.16

A glance at the atlas is
enough to show that in Australia,
very few railway lines have crossed State borders. Most lines snaked slowly
outwards from the coast, especially from the capital cities. If they met at the
border, they did so as rivals and were linked grudgingly, as an afterthought.
Federation made little difference. To some, it even represented a threat to
railway development. George Reid was cheered when he called it
"madness" for the New South Wales "with an enormously rich
territory to develop, to put the policy of railway construction into the hands
of a Federal Parliament".17 With British Columbia in mind,
Forrest tried to make Western Australian membership of the Commonwealth
conditional upon construction of a transcontinental railway. As British
Columbians might have pointed out, there was some difference between a promise
(and, formally at least, Forrest did not even secure that much) and its
performance. Construction of the transcontinental line began in 1912, and the
first trains ran in 1917. While Fremantle remained the first Australian port of
call for ships from Europe, as it did at least until the nineteen-sixties,
Western Australians had a choice of luxury transportation should they wish to
visit the eastern States. Few did so wish. The standardisation of gauges called
for by General Bevan Edwards had to wait even longer. Between 1897 and 1921,
twelve inter-governmental meetings discussed railway gauges, and in the latter
year a Commonwealth Royal Commission recommended standardisation at four feet
eight and a half inches. Not until 1962 was this achieved between Melbourne and
Sydney. The problem of the gauges was finally eliminated in 1968.18
It is always dangerous for historians to discard a possible explanation for a
major episode on the grounds of subsequent inaction. Circumstances can change,
and problems that seem overwhelming at a specific moment in time sometimes have
the good manners to go away. None the less, a system of government that took 67
years to standardise railway gauges can hardly be regarded as the product of a
driving determination to tackle the issue. Albury station was no doubt just as
windy after federation as it had been before. Technology may have facilitated
closer political union, but neither its opportunities nor its shortcomings can
constitute a satisfactory explanation for the federation of Australia.

Social conflict offers a far
more promising field. Australia
was swept by a wave of terrifying labour disputes in the early
eighteen-nineties, at a time of economic depression and massive dislocation in
the banking system.19 The most fundamental challenge came in 1890,
with a widespread strike based on alliance between seamen and shearers. The
Broken Hill mines were closed by a prolonged strike in 1892 and there were
further disputes in the pastoral industry between 1891 and 1894, and in the New South Wales
coalfields between 1893 and 1896. It is not difficult to see federation as a
middle-class and conservative response to this wave of industrial militancy.
Unfortunately, the evidence is indicative rather than conclusive. It was
certainly the case that, with the prominent exception of William Trenwith,
spokesmen for the labour movement were distrustful of a "swells'
movement" and many opposed the federation scheme that it produced. Thus it
is easy enough to conclude that militant trades unionism explains why the
Australian middle class supported federation. (Confusingly, it was probably
also the 1890 Maritime Strike that confirmed New Zealanders in their reluctance
to become any more deeply involved in the neighbours' quarrels.) However, as
Helen Irving has pointed out, there were also conservatives who opposed
federation, a curious deviation if it had been designed as a plot to control
the workers. Indeed, the near-total absence of any supporting evidence "of
conservative opinion or advice along such lines" demonstrates that
"the argument that this was a rational strategy does not hold water".
In fact, the historical case seems to rest almost entirely upon Cardinal Moran,
who described federation "as the only means of preventing one or other of
the Colonies from going right over to extreme Socialism".20
Recently, Alastair Davidson has offered a similar interpretation in his
Gramscian account of the development of State structures in Australia from 1788
to 1901. This seems an impressive consensus from diametrically opposite
viewpoints. However, clergy are not always reliable guides in secular politics,
while Davidson has perhaps surprisingly little to say about the movement that
would seem to be the culmination of his massive study. In fact, one of
Davidson's major concerns is to explain why, in his terms, the people of Australia
voted themselves into the federal prison.21

It is worth noting that the
argument that federation was essentially a precautionary move against socialism
seems to rest very heavily upon a single quotation that expressed the views of
Cardinal Moran. His Eminence first issued his warning in a newspaper interview
in the middle of July 1894, as Queensland
was heading into the most violent industrial dispute of the decade, the
shearers' strike. He was referring to "the extreme communistic views which
are in vogue among some of the Socialistic organisations". It was perhaps something of an occupational
hazard for senior Catholic clerics to fear violent revolution. It is surely
more important to note that his views do not seem to have been shared by
conservative leaders from the closely connected worlds of business and
politics. It seems that few of them echoed his warning. Nor did they embrace
him when he offered himself in 1897 as a candidate for the Convention. Henry
Parkes, who was sometimes seen as an anti-Catholic politician, had earlier
thanked the Cardinal for supporting the federal cause. Each colony elected ten
delegates in 1897. If federation was a plot by the bosses to beguile and entrap
the workers, why did the leaders of the campaign in New South Wales pass up the
chance to throw their support behind the spiritual leader of the unskilled
Irish Catholic workers? In fact, Moran's candidacy provoked "an unpleasant
outburst of that sectarian feeling, which is never far beneath the surface in
the politics of New South Wales".22
Historians should never forget the sectarianism of Australian politics, but it
would be a mistake to build our appreciation of secular politics too narrowly
upon the opinions of priests.

The more closely the
hypothesis is examined, the harder it becomes to sustain the neat symmetry that
sees federation as a conservative response to radical and militant labour.
Brian de Garis is certainly correct in suggesting that neither side intended to
provoke the Maritime Strike, but it was the employers who made the crucial
demand that merchant navy officers should abandon their union affiliation.
Overall, it was the employers who emerged victorious from the militant
confrontations of 1890-94.23 Here again we are brought up against
the conundrum of the precise dating of the movement for federation, and its
various rhythmic ups and downs. The re-launch of 1890-91 had seemed promising:
major intercolonial meetings, a draft constitution and the invitation to the
separate legislatures to carry the project forward. Yet it was at precisely
this moment, when the challenge from labour was at its height, that federation
faltered. By the time it revived in 1897, the union movement was in retreat.
Membership had fallen thanks to hard times, and in both Queensland
and New South Wales,
strike leaders had been sent to gaol. Thus the hypothesis that federation was a
conservative response to labour militancy falters in its timing: at the point
when we should have expected threatened citizens from the established order to
rally to its cause, they showed themselves to be apathetic and indifferent. By
the time they took up the federal cause, the working class threat had been
considerably blunted within the existing context of class and colonial
boundaries. It is noteworthy that Queensland,
the storm centre of the violent strikes of 1894, was the colony that declined
even to take part in the Convention of 1897-98. Its predominantly conservative
politicians seem to have been slow to deduce that the salvation of their class
interests lay in federation.

Paradoxically, it may be one
of the forms through which that blunting took place that created the conditions
for a sustained federal campaign from the middle of the eighteen-nineties. The
strike wave probably helped launch Labor parties as an electoral force. From a
standing start, the Labor Electoral League took 35 out of 140 seats in the New
South Wales general election of 1891, and in other colonies Labor parties also
won a block of parliamentary seats large enough to have an impact on the
political scene - especially as Labor brought
a new level of caucus discipline - but not sufficiently
numerous to take office on their own.24 (By 1901, only Queensland
had experienced a Labor government, and it had lasted for just one week.) The
irony was that the working-class electoral challenge actually brought about a
degree of much-needed stability that forced the existing political systems,
colony by colony, to move from faction to a countervailing system of non-Labor
parties. As a result, a number of the key figures of the federal movement
remained in or close to office throughout the late eighteen-nineties and
established the useful personal relationships necessary to bring together an
initial Commonwealth cabinet. Even so, stability made federation possible
rather than necessary. South
Australia had been ruled by 39 successive ministries
in the first 37 years of responsible government, before Labor arrived in the
legislature in 1893 to focus the minds of the squabbling factions. The
government formed by Charles Kingston that year was to achieve a six-year term,
placing its premier at the heart of a movement for which he was already an enthusiast.

Cardinal Moran had warned
against "extreme" socialism, and the adjective is important. In Britain,
the arrogant and wealthy Sir William Harcourt was credited with the dictum that
"we are all socialists now". To appreciate the legislative philosophy
of the southern hemisphere colonies, explained Pember Reeves, it was necessary
to "distinguish between socialism and a sort of socialism".25
The late nineteenth century saw a steady move towards collectivist State-led
action: were it not for the fact that the early Commonwealth proved so timid in
the extension of its authority, it would be tempting to see federation as part
of that development. Moreover, we should remember the example of Inglis Clark
of Tasmania.
In the early eighteen-nineties he supported federation precisely because he saw
the need for an authority that could respond to legal problems that transcended
local boundaries,26 but by 1900 he had come to doubt whether the
Commonwealth could survive its own financial provisions. Yet most opinion seems
to have moved, if slowly, in the other direction. Thus the 1891 draft
constitution said nothing about old age pensions and industrial arbitration. By
1898, both had been placed within the sphere of the Commonwealth government.

The arbitration power
deserves closer examination, since it is the most obvious candidate for a
constitutional response to the strike wave of the early eighteen-nineties. The
first point to note is that it was not included in the 1891 draft, written in
the crucible of industrial conflict. Kingston
proposed the insertion of such a provision, citing the obvious point that
industrial disputes could spread across local boundaries. He was defeated. This
casts some doubt on Manning Clark's description of the members of the
Convention as "men who were looking for political institutions which would
handle strikes, lockouts [and] industrial anarchy ... with more facility... than
six or seven colonial governments".27 If the arbitration power
formed part of a conservative blueprint to curb the power of militant labour,
its omission in 1891 seems distinctly odd. Thus we have to ask: in whose
interests was the arbitration power proposed, and how did it come to be
included in the revised draft of 1897-98?
For Davidson, compulsory arbitration was something "supported by
the organised labour movement and the nascent Labor parties". It was
accepted by a convention to which Labor representatives had failed to gain
election because it was "politically astute for any State seeking to re-establish
its hegemony to support such initiatives".28

There are some problems here
in the interpretation of evidence. Trainor (who more neutrally regards
arbitration as "an institutionalisation of conflict")29 had
argued that the absence of emphasis upon defence amounted to concealment.
Davidson concludes that the inclusion of a plank desired by the workers was a
device to re-assert hegemony. But if federation was intended to repress the
revolt of labour by armed force, why bother with such gestures at all? Even
more puzzling is the evidence that seems to show that the arbitration clause
was the outcome of one man's pertinacity, an unlikely scenario for a ruling
class anti-revolutionary blueprint.

The proposal to add
industrial arbitration to the federal powers was argued unsuccessfully at Adelaide in 1897 by Henry
Bournes Higgins who, according to Garran, was blessed with "the British
virtue of not knowing when he was beaten".30 (In fact Higgins
was Irish.) La Nauze more waspishly noted that "he was not given to
compromise if he was, in his judgment, in the right; and this usually was his
judgment".31 He tried again when the Convention finally
alighted in Melbourne the following year, insisting that he was not even
proposing that arbitration should be compulsory. "I simply wish to give
the Federal Parliament power to legislate on the subject.... I think I may appeal
even to those who are opposed to conciliation and arbitration in industrial
disputes in this respect". Higgins made the obvious point that a waterside
dispute in Sydney could easily spread to Melbourne, and argued that
the Commonwealth must be empowered to respond. This, one might have thought,
was an obvious deduction from the strikes of 1890-91. But, perhaps recalling
the integrity of Scotland's
separate legal system, Symon replied that a strike that crossed the border
between two colonies was really two different strikes. Other delegates seemed
equally unpersuaded. Unexpectedly, Forrest announced that he would support
Higgins to prove that behind his conservative exterior there lurked some
liberal instincts. The rest of the
Western Australian delegation swung behind their leader, so that it was
the colony least troubled by labour
unrest that wrote arbitration into the constitution.32

Thus it is not at all clear whether
industrial arbitration was a device to control the unions, a surrender to the
workers or a sop intended to disguise the reassertion of State hegemony. What
does seem certain is that it formed no part of a concerted federalist blueprint
for an Australian central government. "Had some of those whom [Higgins]
persuaded to abandon their opposition been gifted with power to see into the
future," mused Garran, "the result might have been otherwise."33
Far from relishing his victory, the idiosyncratic Higgins concluded that the
Bill as a whole was undemocratic and led the opposition to its endorsement in
the Victorian referendum campaign.34 It took much of the second
federal parliament to achieve the legislation that would establish Commonwealth
arbitration machinery. It proved
unexpectedly difficult, for instance, to craft legislation capable of
controlling coastal shipping, one of the key areas of conflict in 1891. Even
then, in 1906, the High Court - another of the controlling
institutions created by the new constitution - ruled that Commonwealth
arbitration was in no way binding upon employees of the State railway systems.
It was left to Higgins, now a member of the bench himself, to redeem the clause
for which he had so doggedly fought. In 1907, in the landmark Harvester case,
he used it to assert the power to fix a national minimum wage.

A cynical analysis of
Australia's complex federal constitution might conclude that conservative
interests deliberately re-organised the structure of government into a series
of watertight compartments (the analogy with the Titanic is tempting) to ensure the isolation of any segment of the
continent that fell into the extremist hands. This was the strategy attributed
by Manning Clark to the delegates of 1891: "they all agreed that a
division of legislative powers between the federal government and six or seven
colonial parliaments would prevent any radical change in the ownership or
distribution of property by constitutional means".35 Even if we
pass over the inconvenient problem that their immediate contemporaries refused
to implement the solution designed by the men of 1891, it is possible to
identify two weaknesses in Clark's line of argument. First, it requires us to
conclude that the assembled politicians of Australia deliberately designed a system of government that was
"ponderous", to quote Sir John Cockburn's favourite adjective.36
In reality, the evidence suggests that the complexity of the constitution
reflected the mutual suspicions of their regional points of view rather than
any united sense of their class interest.

Secondly, it seems odd that
politicians should respond to a perceived social threat by creating a central
government, even if a weak one, that might be captured by their enemies. The
men of 1891 may perhaps be acquitted on this heading: political Labor was in
its infancy and nobody could be expected to have foreseen its discipline and
potential popularity. But by 1898, the prospect that future governments might
fall under working class political control was by no means imaginary. True, the
previous year, a New South Wales
conservative, Bruce Smith, condemned political Labor as a "growth upon our
body politic" and predicted that the tumour would be "removed for all
time by the proposed federation of the Colonies". Smith was one of the
last proponents of absolute laisser faire,
hardly typical even of fellow conservatives.
In the event, federation did as much to nurture as to eradicate
political Labor. The party was to flourish in Victoria, where it was a late starter,
largely as a by-product of Commonwealth politics.37 How ironic it
would be to conclude that a deep-laid federalist plot by the Victorian
bourgeoisie rebounded to create a threat where none had previously existed! It
is a whole lot more likely that Manning Clark's seductive hypothesis lacks
foundation.

It has already been
suggested that the broad base of the movement for federation only makes sense
if the earlier political divide between protection and free trade is
discounted. It is worth remembering that when free traders and protectionists
finally came together in the Fusion government of 1909, they made the tactical
error of leaving Labor as the only feasible alternative for disgruntled voters.
At the Commonwealth general election of 1910, Labor captured a majority in both
houses of parliament. It may be riposted that there was a measure of difference
between installing Andrew Fisher as prime minister and, pace Cardinal Moran, "going right over to extreme
Socialism". But if any parts of Australia
were likely to swing into the revolutionary column, they would probably be the
States where assertive rural and mining proletariats operated within relatively
small total populations, such as Queensland or
Western Australia.
It would have been singularly ironic if the principle of equal representation
had given the far Left a disproportionate voice in the powerful Senate. As it
happened, in 1910 Labor swept the whole of Australia to win all eighteen
vacant Senate seats. It seems odd that conservative forces should have sought
to safeguard their class interests by creating previously non-existent central
machinery that could so easily fall into the hands of the people they most
feared.

Of course, common sense, if
only of the post hoc ergo propter hoc
variety, tells us that there ought to
be a causal link between the industrial unrest of the early nineties and the
successful achievement of federation soon afterwards. But common sense and
cynicism may not be reliable guides. Conservative federalists might well have
had good reasons for concealment: in plain English, they would have been well
advised to omit any reference to their intentions to reassert their hegemony
from their public utterances. But nobody has ever found such evidence in their
private correspondence, their diaries or their memoirs. A continent-wide
conspiracy to enmesh the workers in constitutional shackles would surely have
left some trace behind it. The addition of arbitration to the powers of the
Commonwealth looks more like a recognition, half-accidental and half-reluctant,
of the onward march of collectivism. Arbitration merits consideration because,
in the drafting of the Commonwealth constitution, it was the issue that most
closely related to the threat of industrial militancy. The more closely it is
examined, the harder it becomes to view the achievement of federation in
1900-01 as a simple response to the strikes of ten years earlier.

Economic Motives: Banking, Investment and Trade

And so we come to economic motives. Even in a post-Marxist
era, few will dispute that economic considerations are fundamental to any
political process. The problem lies in the difficulty of disentangling just how they operated. As a preliminary
sub-classification, it may be useful to distinguish between financial and
commercial incentives, separating banking and investment on the one hand from
trade on the other.

In
1893, Australia
suffered the most serious financial crisis in its history. The speculative boom
of the previous decade had already given way to recession, and the early
nineties had seen the collapse of building companies in the eastern colonies. Queensland tried to raise £2.5 million on the London money market in
1891, and netted only £300,000.1 Nor did British investors content
themselves with refusing to pour good money after bad. Thanks to the telegraph,
they could easily liquidate existing investments at the first sign of trouble.
In the absence of a central bank, Australia's financial houses issued
their own banknotes, and most had pumped out more paper than they could redeem
in gold. In January 1893 the first of the major trading banks simply ran out of
cash - ironically, it was called
the Federal Bank of Australia - and by May, 14 of the 25
colonial banks had closed their doors.2 Intermittent crises
continued to erupt for several years: Queensland, laggard in its acceptance of
political union, endured a severe shock as late as 1896. Should we see the
federation movement as a means of restoring Australian credit? At the Bathurst
Convention, Thomas MacHattie appealed to the example of Canada, where it was
claimed that federation enabled the Dominion government to borrow at half the
interest rates previously charged to the separate provinces.3 Yet to
a remarkable degree, this incentive featured neither in federalist propaganda
nor was federation prominently mentioned among proposals to restructure the
Australian banking system. In desperate times, retrenchment was the order of
the day, and an extra tier of government meant more expense. After Queensland's humiliation, nobody seriously expected that
British investors would buy colonial securities under any circumstances:
gold-rich Western Australia
was the only colony they smiled upon. Perhaps it was the utter implausibility
of suggesting that any constitutional reform would be sufficient to arouse the
enthusiasm of British investors that explains why there was so little mention
of this argument in federalist propaganda. Since most Australians would have
seen benefits in developing the continent's resources through low-interest
loans from abroad, it is unlikely that omission can be explained by any desire
to conceal.

A
landmark contribution to recent historical scholarship has come from P.J. Cain
and A.G. Hopkins. Put simply, their theory of "gentlemanly
capitalism" explains how financial interests in London
manipulated the British empire through their
ability to provide low-interest loans overseas. Their hypothesis does not
command universal acceptance, but even an agnostic can make two major points in
praise of its authors. Unlike most
theorists of "imperialism", who concentrate on Africa and Asia, Cain
and Hopkins have sought to accommodate the white colonies within their
argument, for instance attempting to account for Confederation in Canada
as a trade-off for British-guaranteed railway funding. Secondly, their work is
supported by impressive bibliographical knowledge, including an awareness of
local academic controversies around the world. It is therefore worth noting
that their discussion of Australia goes no further than suggesting that the
financial crisis of the early eighteen-nineties "gave a strong impetus to
the federation movement ... since it convinced business interests of the need to
unify and extend the internal market". Thus their explanation hinges not
upon investment but rather on "free-tection".4
Furthermore, they base their claim upon a statement in Manning Clark's Short History of Australia. This useful
overview was published in 1963, and two generations of students have good
reason to be grateful for its provocative and evocative text. In short, the
progenitors of the "gentlemanly capitalism" thesis could find neither
contemporary evidence nor subsequent scholarship that might tie the federation
movement to a desire to generate low-interest British loan funding.

Although Clark
did not cite his sources, there is no reason to disagree with his statement
that "some bankers and financiers believed a federal government might
prevent a repetition of the financial depression of 1890-93".5 How far they shaped the new system of
government to their wishes is open to doubt. The document that emerged in 1898
would have made the High Court of Australia the ultimate arbiter of
constitutional cases, with no further appeal permitted to the Privy Council in London. This provision
triggered a sharp dispute between the British government and the colonial
delegates. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, acknowledged that he was
under pressure from "banks and other financial and commercial institutions
having large interests in Australia".
In the end, a meeting between the two sides struck a compromise that saved face
for both. When the British negotiators left the room, their Australian
counterparts "seized each other's hands and danced ... to express their
jubilation".6 This does not sound like a group of men designing
a new structure of government with the primary intention of winning the smiles
of British bankers. The point deserves
to be underlined: in the most contentious dispute over the framing of
legislation, the imperial government argued that the abolition of appeals would
discourage British investment in Australia, but the colonial
delegates insisted on curtailment all the same.

Nor did the Commonwealth
government take urgent steps to involve itself in the areas that had triggered
the crisis of the early eighteen-nineties. A major cause of the financial
crisis of 1893 had been the over-printing of paper money by individual colonial
banks. The Commonwealth did not get into the business of issuing banknotes
until 1910, belatedly using its powers of taxation to squeeze out private
sector rivals. Another element that helped to explain the scale of the crash
was the absence of any local equivalent of the Bank of England, with its
authority to regulate the financial sector. It was not until after the Second
World War that Australia
acquired an effective central bank. Ironically, both these initiatives came
from Labor governments, not from their business-oriented opponents. Overall, it
is difficult to see how federation could have been a direct response to the
financial crisis of the early nineties.

As
earlier noted, in 1949 R.S. Parker suggested a new way of explaining why
federation came about. He argued that Australia
should be thought of less as divided into six colonies but rather as organised
into eight economic regions, only one of which, the island of Tasmania,
was coterminous with existing colonial boundaries. Thus, by implication, the
dynamic accounting for the pressure to federate came from the problems of
border districts, where political boundaries cut across the natural lines of
trade and communication. In this, Parker was fleshing out an argument that
enthusiasts for federation had advanced as an explanation for the success of their
movement. "It was natural that the border districts, where the irritation
and absurdity of the provincial tariffs were most apparent, should take the
lead in the popular movement."7 However, it is tempting to
suggest that in advancing his hypothesis, Parker was thinking very much as a
political scientist, seeking a general theory that would sweep up all the
specific examples. By contrast, his main antagonist, Geoffrey Blainey, was
equally characteristic in resorting to the classical historian's riposte of
"Yes but...".8

In one sense, Parker's
framework does highlight an intriguing aspect of the federation movement, one
noted by Vance Palmer, the custodian of the "Legend of the Nineties".
In rural areas, "there was little talk of federation but the essential
unity of Australia
as a country with common interests was taken for granted". By contrast,
"in the capital cities, federation was discussed as an important issue,
but it was regarded almost as an alliance between countries foreign to one
another and having rival economies".9 This was almost certainly
true of Palmer's own colony, Victoria, and probably also of South Australia,
where an Adelaide newspaper observed that "Federation is to be a union of
hearts, but it is also to be a partial amalgamation of businesses."10
Elsewhere, the capital cities were less enthusiastic. Indeed, it is a
remarkable feature of Australian federation that in one of the most urbanised
societies in the world, a fundamental movement for change was carried in the
face of opposition from at least three of the principal cities. Brisbane voted two-to-one against federation in 1899; Sydney had been evenly
divided the year before and the narrow Yes majorities in
"Perth-mantle" in 1900 can probably be explained largely by the fear
that the gold-rich interior would insist upon breaking away. Even within the
three colonies that were more enthusiastic towards federation, there were
pockets of resistance in the capital cities: the 32 percent No vote across South Australia rose to 43 percent in Adelaide;
in Tasmania, the No vote almost doubled from
the 19 percent island-wide average to 36 percent in Hobart.

However, this curious
inversion of what we might expect as the driving force for change is not enough
to sustain Parker's hypothesis. Except in Queensland, rural support for federation
tipped the balance rather than outvoted the capital. Moreover, as Blainey
pointed out in his discussion of Victoria, the six border electorates, from
Wodonga to Mildura, backed federation by the same four-to-one margin of the
colony at large.11 In focusing upon colonial boundaries, Parker
overlooked one common-sense point: while artificial borders may create
inconvenience for some, they present opportunities for others and so create
special interests that will resist change. Darling Downs electorates voted
against federation: Parker himself showed that farmers around Toowoomba feared
competition from northern New South
Wales precisely because the areas were so similar.12
Some South Australians were also conscious that intercolonial free trade was a
two-way process. "We shall gain the Victorian market, it is said," a
farmer grumbled. "Well, the Victorians will gain ours".13
Yet even these considerations were open to individual interpretation. Ostensibly, the Victorian cattle industry was
protected by a stock tax that discouraged imports from other colonies, but by
the late nineties, some cattlemen had come to doubt whether they really
benefited from such protection at all.14 In some border areas,
ethnicity and class may have played as great a role as economic interests. This
would certainly seem to have been the case in Broken Hill, which voted No in
1898. Memories of the ferocious strike of 1892
probably explain working class distrust of the federation movement in a
remote mining town even though it relied largely upon nearby South Australia for access to the outside
world. Similarly, the presence of German settlers in southern Queensland may partly account for opposition
to federation in that region. Why this should have been so is more a mystery:
it puzzled Pastor Haas, their spiritual leader, and it does not seem to have
been a factor in South Australia,
the other region with a sizeable German-descended population.15

Parker's hypothesis can also
be faulted on four wider grounds. First, it is something of an exaggeration to
claim (in the words of L.F. Crisp) that colonial boundaries "became more
and more grotesque in their artificiality". Some at least of the
oratorical fire directed against them was exaggerated. Forrest in 1898 called
the boundary between Western Australia and South Australia
"merely a line drawn on the map." All the colonies were separated by
"imaginary lines [which] require sweeping away."16 Removing
a line from the map would still have left hundreds of miles of the Nullabor
between the two settler populations. Secondly, Parker's emphasis upon
inconvenient boundaries is not time-specific. "We had the natural outlet
for a portion of Western Victoria, for the
Barrier [Broken Hill] district, and for South-Western Queensland," a South
Australian politician told cheering crowd at a federalist meeting, adding that
they "had in this respect almost everything to gain from federation".
A good Parkerian sentiment - and presumably just as true
when it was uttered in April 1890 as it would be ten years later, but not
enough to bring about federation at that time.17 Thirdly, Parker
failed to address one of the issues that federalists took good care to conjure
out of sight: if artificial borders were a barrier to commerce, why did
Australians adopt the constitutional
solution of a new system of government rather than seek the simpler political
answer of an intercolonial free-trade zone? There were good tactical reasons
for ducking the issue, simply because some conservative voices had argued that
the remedy for the depression was "either federation, or failing that, a Customs Union"
[emphasis added].If they
bothered to notice the point at all, campaigners for a Yes vote in 1898 simply
asserted that "there can be no lasting freedom of Australasian trade
without federation".18 Thirdly,
Parker's analysis overlooked the problem that arguments for local advantage
could be counter-productive elsewhere. An Albury newspaper saw federation as a
blow to those who regarded Sydney
as "the centre of the solar system".19 Grenfell's local
newspaper listed the reasons for voting Yes, one of them being "Because
Sydney should not be greedy."20 Queensland's decision to accept
federation, albeit reluctantly, becomes even more complicated in the light of
Parker's re-design of Australia into eight economic zones, since two of them
fell largely within the northern colony. In Cairns, federation was hailed as a
blow against "Brisbane and the spoon-fed southern districts".21
"Federation offers Maryborough the last and only chance of to some extent
checking the greed that has characterised the octopus of South", remarked
a central Queensland newspaper.22 A spokesman for the 107,000 people
of the colony's capital city retaliated by describing federation as "a
deep-laid scheme to wipe out Brisbane".23

In any case, economic
interests were filtered through personal judgement. John Bastin provided two
intriguing examples from Western
Australia. The owner of a Fremantle hardware and
timber firm was an active opponent of federation; the manager of his Geraldton
branch served on the executive of the rival Federal League. Another notable
federalist was the Perth
tailor, John Phair, who was President of the local branch of the nascent
Australian Natives' Association. The clothing trade generally opposed
federation, fearing competition from larger enterprises in the eastern
colonies. "Was Phair then a more ardent member of the A.N.A. than he was a
tailor?"24 An anti-federalist in Capricornia assured cattle
interests that compulsory vegetarianism was the only policy open to southern
politicians if they wished to block the import of Queensland beef.25
Similarly, many New Zealand market gardeners took comfort in the thought they
would be able to supply Sydney markets in drought years even if they would be
excluded at other times by local competition, irrespective of tariffs or
political unions.26

The disentangling of these
calculations is complicated by the fact that many of them were directed not so
much at immediate circumstances as towards the longer term. "What shall we
do with our boys?" was a cry in late nineteenth-century Melbourne.27
"What shall we do with our Mataros?" asked South Australian
wine-producers as they moved into over-production in the eighteen-nineties.
Industry leader Thomas Hardy took "consolation" from "dreams of
federation" as he too asked "what is to become of all these boys and
girls?"28 Some visions of the future may strike us as
improbable, if not bizarre. The tiny coastal port of Kingston gave a 95 percent
vote in favour of federation in the hopes of becoming the "Liverpool of
Australia".29 Hay in the Riverina had hopes of becoming the
Chicago of New South Wales.30 "Sydney was naturally adapted for
the building of steel ships," argued a speaker at the New South Wales
Chamber of Manufacturers in 1898. "Was it too much to expect that in the
near future she would become to Australia
what Glasgow was to Scotland?"31 The Ballarat Star not only laid claim in
1898 to the future federal capital, but described in fantastical detail the
parliament building, "a massive structure, no doubt, faced with stone,
with an elevation in the Corinthian style, extending along the entire
front", along with the courts, opera house and viceregal residence.32
Ballarat's historian is at a loss to explain why the city voted so
overwhelmingly for federation - even in 1899, by which time
any chance of becoming the federal capital had been surrendered to New South
Wales.33 Of course many of these hopes failed in fulfilment. How far
they influenced the responses of individuals to the question of federation at
the time, we can never know.

The second-guessing of those
hoped-for but now lost futures constitutes a methodological minefield for
historians. For instance, Blainey noted that some of the strongest support for
federation in South Australia came from
electorates in the wheat-growing area north of Adelaide. He pointed out that "keen
competition from Victoria" and
"growing self-sufficiency" in other colonies was hitting South Australia's
exports, a process that continued after federation. "The wheat industry
could, and did, gain little from the removal of colonial tariffs." Thus,
to Blainey, two-fifths of the colony's Yes vote lacked "a sound
explanation in terms of economic interest".34 He was roundly
reproved by Norris: "the question of what actually happened to wheat
exports after federation is not relevant". What mattered "is what was
thought likely to happen at the time". In any case, Norris argued that it
was simplistic to assume that the South Australian wheatlands produced nothing
but wheat. The colony's principal intercolonial exports were in fact
by-products, flour, hay and chaff, which were thought to suffer from trade
barriers. Opportunities for new markets also appealed to the salt industry of
the Yorke peninsula, while scattered among the
wheat farmers, there were pastoralists who hoped to benefit from the wider
horizons of federation.35

As already noted, the
Parker-Blainey debate fizzled out leaving much of Australia untouched. On balance, de
Garis seems to regard it as a draw. It was "likely", he concluded,
"that some of the opposition to federation was evoked by real or imagined
economic threats". But "it is more difficult to prove that economic
causes were responsible for general movement in favour ... though clearly they
played a part".36 The Adelaide newspaper, the Register, which comfortably concluded
that "after all, one of the most impressive arguments relative to
federation is the argument of the pocket" was in no doubt that the South
Australian pocket would say Yes. Yet it could equally warn that "if our
stockbreeders are not able to stand up against competition from far-distant Queensland they should
realise that the consumer will not always consent to prop them up".37
The economic interests that counted were those of consumers seeking to
buy cheap, rather than those of producers hoping to sell dear. "Timid men
and commercial weaklings who require to be spoonfed may not like it" but
"the fittest must survive".38 One South Australian
manufacturer, William Burford, claimed to rise above such considerations.
"Should the result prove to my firm somewhat different to my expectations
then I am loyal enough to my native land to put up with the same so that
Australia shall become a great nation in the future ... rather than we should
continue as a few weak disintegrated provinces."39 Burford's
protestation of disinterest was intended to counter suspicions that he planned
to exploit federation in order to cut wages. In any case, he was wealthy enough
to cope with some financial loss, an advantage that others did not share.
"Take no notice of what the Federal delegates have to say, as they are not
working men who have only their bare wages to live upon," warned one South
Australian labour representative. The colony was "not in a position to
compete against New South Wales or Victoria".If workers wished "to
keep such manufactories we have in our midst", they would be well advised
to vote No.In Adelaide's two most
industrial electorates, factory workers voted to reject the Bill.40
Nor was Burford's high-mindedness shared by every middle-class Australian. One
Tasmanian opponent was described as "particularly violent and
uncompromising, but he is the sort of man who would vote against the Millenium
[sic] if he thought it would involve him in a payment of 20/- per ann. more
taxes". It is difficult for historians to recover economic motives and
harder still to assess the relative role they played in the decisions of individual
voters. Individuals responded to arguments in different ways, especially as
nobody could really be sure what would be the impact of intercolonial free
trade. In Tasmania,
small-scale industries, such as shoe-making, tanning and biscuit-making, would
probably go under "when exposed to the competition of Victorian
manufacturers with their better & cheaper methods", but fruit and
timber production could be expected to expand. "What the results of the
dislocation will be no one can foretell."41 It was not entirely
surprising that during the referendum campaigns in Tasmania, "large
numbers of people were tired of arithmetic; what they wished to hear about was
the future of the Australian people".42 An economic determinist might retort
that people will only adopt so noble a stance if they are persuaded that there
is no threat to their material interests. Thus the argument about economic
causes comes full circle, back to its own assumptions. As Helen Irving has
recently pointed out, even if economic motives provided the crucial political
motivation, it remains to be explained why these were harnessed to federation,
and why thie linkage should have happened in the eighteen-nineties.43
It is tempting to embrace a comment made by Michael Oakeshott long ago: "to
say of an event that it is due solely to 'economic causes', is not bad history;
it is not history at all".44

A New Explanatory Theory: The Utopian Moment

In 1997, Helen Irving advanced a challenging new
hypothesis to account for the construction of the Australian Commonwealth.
Her approach was through the prism of cultural history, one that explored the
discourse of the federation movement in terms of contemporary social and gender
values. Only in her thoughtful conclusion did she make explicit her view of
historical explanation: a longer elaboration of her theory would be a useful
contribution to discussion. Irving
regarded the timing of federation as "one of the enduring mysteries of
Australian history". There was nothing new about schemes for the union of
the colonies: "why then did Federation occur when it did, and not
before?" (As will be argued in the next section, the more those earlier
proposals are examined, the harder it becomes to answer this question with
confidence.) Parenthetically dismissing any notion of a single cause, Irving went on to
"challenge fundamentally a number of earlier interpretations of
Federation". In particular, she dismissed causal hypotheses based upon
class and regional economic interests, and generally discounted materialistic
and utilitarian motives. Rather, she argued, the eighteen-nineties represented
a fin de siècle decade that produced
"almost surreal optimism" as it anticipated a new century. All
Western countries were characterised by faith in progress and modernisation.
The reason why the Australian version of this optimism expressed itself in the
movement for federation is to be found in the distinctive "Utopian
moment" that characterised the colonies for about a decade through to the
early eighteen-nineties. By Utopia, Irving
meant not the dream-worlds condemned in passing by William Pember Reeves in his
State Experiments in Australia and New
Zealand, but rather the entire antipodean legislative project to redesign
the role and boundaries of society which Reeves chronicled in his 1902 survey.
"What makes a work Utopian is the belief that a whole system can be
written down, constructed from a single set of principles."1 At
first sight, the Commonwealth constitution might indeed seem to batter its way
into such a classification.

Irving's theory is an
immensely welcome contribution to a becalmed debate. However, it is not without
its problems. Few would contest her view that there is no single reason for the
success of the movement for federation. Yet if we are to answer the question
that she rightly highlights and account for its vigour in the
eighteen-nineties, we are surely entitled to expect to identify some
contemporary combination of needs or pressures that acted as the
"trigger" for federation, even if they may be insufficient to occupy
the larger role of its "cause". Yet each of the plausible and often
postulated candidate "causes" simply fail to withstand the close
scrutiny of the search for supporting evidence. This problem is hardly solved
by electing to view the late eighteen-nineties as a time of optimism, surreal
or otherwise. Indeed, if we subscribe to the view that the effective campaign
for federation began at Tenterfield in 1889, then the origins of the
constitutional blueprint itself must be traced to a time when Australia was very far from
optimistic about its social and economic destinies. Conversely, the decade
through to the mid-nineties that Irving sees as Australia's
"Utopian moment" coincided with the years in which first the Federal
Council and then the 1891 draft constitution drifted into the doldrums. Thus Irving's theory comes up
against a temporal mismatch in two important respects. How could Australians
have been swept into a mood of optimism powerful enough to transform their
structure of government in the later eighteen-nineties so soon after the
despair that had seared the first half of the decade? (Inconveniently, the
least enthusiastic federalists were the Western Australians, who by 1897
enjoyed the best reason of all the colonies to believe in a - literally - golden future.) If Australia's
"Utopian moment" had indeed peaked by the mid-nineties, how did it
find the energy to transmute itself into the sustained campaign for fundamental
constitutional change in the immediate aftermath?

The
inverted commas, used by Irving herself, are not intended to mock the concept.
Without doubt, it is illuminating to be invited to reconsider late
nineteenth-century Australia
as a society driven by a desire for Utopian precision and perfection. Yet the more
we look at Australia
in those terms, the harder it is to see a direct connection with the
constitution that emerged from the successive federal conventions of that
decade. It does indeed conform to Irving's
definition that "a whole system can be written down", but can we
equally conclude that it was "constructed from a single set of
beliefs"? "Federation is a compromise," wrote Pember Reeves.
"Compromises when at all elaborate usually contain paradoxes, on
paper."2 As Helen Irving herself has recently reminded us,
Bernhard Wise excused alleged blemishes in the draft constitution by pleading
that "until we learn the secret of obtaining perfection in human affairs,
a political choice must always lie between the lesser and greater of two
evils".3 This is emphatically not the language of utopianism. Irving regards the popularity of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward as evidence of the
prevalence of utopian thinking in late nineteenth-century Australia. It is worth remembering
that Bellamy's chief populariser was William
Lane, who departed in 1893 to establish his ideal
New Australia in the wilds of Paraguay:
real-life Australia
simply did not measure up to the ideal. Reeves described the Commonwealth
constitution as "an effort to reconcile two inconsistent principles",
the equality of individuals, "the basis of democracy" and "the
political equality of six federating States".4 With one
prominent exception, the men who designed the Australian constitution do not
seem to have been troubled by the inconsistency. It is the Australian labour
movement that is conventionally associated with the notion of "the light
on the hill". By contrast, it is not so much Utopia that hovers over the
Fathers of Federation as myopia: even on matters as fundamental as parliamentary
government and party politics, many of them entertained hazy notions of the
future. Henry Bournes Higgins, with his vision of government-supervised
industrial relations, stood out as the exception. Higgins did indeed demand a constitution that
reflected a single set of beliefs, his
beliefs, a stance that led him to reject the compromise between citizen
equality and State parity and campaign for the rejection of the document that
he had helped to draft.

Thus
Australia's
"Utopian moment" would have supplied an illuminating explanation had
the movement for federation faltered during the eighteen-nineties and perished
under the conflicts of Australian divisions.
Yet every historian should have the humility to recognise that few
explanatory hypotheses "work" in accounting for every aspect the
problems they seek to address. Can we modify Irving's Utopian theory, to accommodate
federation within the process of a growing complexity of government, one that
was reducing to legislative formulae not so much the blueprint for perfection
as the desire for progress? As Reeves put it, people were "never so well
that they do not wish to be better".5 The modification is
attractive, but the argument is open to two powerful objections. The first is
to be found in the circular relationship between assumption and deduction.
Perhaps the process of government in Australia had indeed reached such a
stage of "maturity" or "sophistication" (the
anthropomorphic terminology ought to flash a warning of intellectual sleight of
hand) that it logically and necessarily spawned a superior tier of federal
government. Unfortunately, the only evidence we possess to support the
hypothesis lies in the fact that a federal government was created at that time.
Its emergence might be attributed to the development of government structures,
but equally we might choose to regard federation as the product of the drought
or the test matches. Secondly, there is, once again, the problem of the lost
seventh colony. New Zealanders in the eighteen-nineties had not only gone
further than most of their Australian neighbours in expanding the practical
role of government but also in redefining the theoretical scope of the State.
Yet a society that could throw up a leader such as Richard John Seddon was more
pragmatic than dogmatic. We are thus left asking why New Zealand stood aloof from a
movement that logically it should have led.

The Voice of the People

To emphasise the impenetrable motives of individuals
brings us to a fundamental conundrum in the federation story. The achievement
of the Commonwealth of Australia was built upon the most democratic process
that the world had ever seen. In some colonies, adult males voted - or were offered the chance to vote - three times to choose delegates and to
approve their handiwork. In South Australia, women
joined men at the polls. Some perceived direct and overwhelming personal
motives that determined them to vote for or against. But it seems likely that
many Australians found it difficult to decide where their long-term interests
might lie. The cynical might link their uncertainty to the remarkable
consistency with which political elites seem only to have asked the people to
pronounce when they were reasonably certain that the verdict would be
favourable.

However
reluctantly, we must discard the view that women played a crucial role. The
temporal relationship between feminism and federation seems to be about as
causally significant as the connection between federation and drought.
Catherine Helen Spence sought one of South
Australia's ten delegate places at the 1897 poll, the
only woman candidate across the whole continent. Even she felt it necessary to
resort to the ploy of submitting her nomination five minutes before the
deadline to avoid any challenge to her eligibility. Her argument that
federation would bring "to Australian politics that dignity and
consistency which have been so woefully lacking in the past" might be
identified as a specifically female point of view. However, one federalist
pressure group included her name among its list of the "10 best men",
insisting "she's the best man of the lot".1 Spence was
also backed by a women's temperance organisation. None the less, she not only
ran twenty-second but regarded her performance as a moral victory, since she
had campaigned independently of the main "tickets". This was an
admission that women did not constitute a separate and identifiable block vote.
(She did at least have the consolation of having polled ten times the vote won
by the male candidate who died during the campaign.) Even if she had been
elected, there would have been no guarantee that the Convention's Fathers would
have shared the gender enlightenment of her home province, and she might not
have been allowed to take her seat.

Overall,
Australia
had moved forward since 1883, when a journalist had thought it as natural for
politicians celebrating the rail link at Albury to talk about federation as
women to discuss their dress-makers. From the time of the Bathurst Convention,
which was supported by a Ladies' Organising Committee, Women's Federal Leagues
undertook the kind of fund-raising and envelope-stuffing that would remain the
standard female contribution to politics for decades ahead. When Allan McLean
held an anti-federation rally at Bairnsdale in 1898, a hostile journalist
reported that the audience was small, and composed largely of
"ladies". Perhaps they were persuaded "to a woman" by
McLean's oratory but "etiquette restrains them from those expressions of
approval by which a male supporter relieves his feelings".2 A Tasmanian versifier (inspired, it would
seem, by a song from The Gondoliers)
was so concerned when a friend became obsessed with the arguments for and
against federation that he escorted the sufferer home:

I left him on his door-step,
and I'll forfeit you my life,

If he didn't start
explaining federation to his wife...3

Despite
the flamboyant façade of popular involvement through the ballot box, there is
good reason to suspect that in voting on the federation issue, Australians of
both sexes were running little errands for the Ministers of State. For many, it
was not a pleasure that they treasured. A deluge of propaganda did little to
dispel confusion. In New South Wales, copies
of the draft federation Bill were sent to every household.4
Circulation was equally widespread in Victoria.
Asked by an enthusiastic customer if he was following the 1898 referendum
campaign, a despairing Melbourne barber replied that he had read the Bill three
times over "and I was more confounded at the end than when I first
began".5 Saturation press coverage of the issue was not
necessarily more helpful. An assiduous South Australian newspaper reader
confessed that "after wading through the correspondence for and against
this momentous issue I lay down the paper with a sigh"."I
have heard so much on each side, I've read so much argument for and
against," complained a New South
Wales voter, "that I have not the least notion
which is right. One side is certainly wrong, but there is such an apparency of
truth in both parties that I cannot detect the truth from the lies."7

As if the pressures were not
great enough in journalistic prose, the federation issue also triggered an
outpouring of poetry. During the 1898 referendum campaign, the Sydney Morning Herald received on
average a dozen effusions of patriotic verse every day. "The federation
poet is a fearful scourge just now," remarked a Tasmanian newspaper at the
same time.8 It was probably the rival kings of Barataria who
inspired one Hobart
bard:

Oh!
It's Federation this, and it's Federation that;

You
dare not stop your neighbour just to have a friendly chat.

He
talks of frightful figures, how he lays awake at night;

At
first you only "think" he's mad, but soon you know he's quite.9

The problem was evidently as severe among the
demotic songsters of Launceston:

I
am fairly flummixed, I am

All
over this 'ere Federation;

I
thought 'twould be like eating jam

To
start an Australian nation.

But
it's rather a three-cornered game,

Why
squaring the circle ain't in it;

There's
but one who has mastered the same,

And
he's in New Norfolk this minit.10

New Norfolk was Tasmania's mental
hospital.

Not
surprisingly, the plethora of propaganda generated cynicism, as demonstrated by
a versifier from Bega in New South
Wales:

Four loaves of bread and a
bushel of wheat

Divided
by twopence and sixteen feet,

Are
equal to seventy pounds of steam,

And
that is the cost of the federal scheme!

...

The
cost of the scheme you can easily see,

For
three sevens are seventy three,

Allowing
a margin for possibly more,

Then
three times nine are a hundred and four!11

From cynicism it was a short step to denial. A
correspondent of a Rockhampton newspaper complained that "not ninety
percent" of rural voters in central Queensland
took "the slightest interest in the voluminous matter printed from day to
day" during the 1899 referendum campaign. Most regarded all propaganda on
the subject "with as much suspicion as a patent medicine
advertisement".12 Further north, at Cairns
public opinion was described as "apathetically one-sided".13
Yet north and central Queensland
appear in the textbooks as federalist strongholds. Statistically this was so,
but it was so partly because everywhere across Australia referendum turn-outs were
relatively low compared with those at general elections. It may be that the
public sensed that its much-vaunted approval was only sought when the
politicians were confident of the outcome. If so, the voters did not disappoint
their leaders. Not once in ten referendums did they vote No - but only once, in Victoria in 1899, did the Yes vote exceed
fifty percent of the registered electorate.14

The Problem of Historical Explanation

Concluding her study of the referendum campaigns in
the country districts of New South
Wales, Patricia Hewett suggested that historians
could "take comfort from the irrationality of voters' reactions to the
questions that confronted them". If the voters themselves found such
difficulty in confronting the issue of federation, subsequent historians could
hardly be expected to determine "clear evidence of motivation".1
The reassurance is welcome, but it may risk throwing the historical
enquiry too far in the opposite direction of negative resignation. A survey
that steadily shreds the logical underpinning of each successive postulated
cause and textbook explanation may ultimately lose sight of one very basic
fact: federation did take place. History rests upon a philosophical base, even
if not always clearly articulated, one that takes for granted that events
originate in causes. Since federation did indeed come about, it follows that it
must have happened for intelligible, and therefore presumably recoverable,
reasons. If historians find difficulty in convincingly identifying those
causes, the problem must lie either in historical methodology itself, or in the
apparently inscrutable ways in which human beings reach their decisions.

Hewett
may have exaggerated in referring to "the irrationality of voters'
responses" during the New South
Wales referendum campaigns. None the less, her
research contributes two points to the search for a causative analysis. The
first is that many voters were confused, so much so that it is difficult to
disentangle the reasons why they voted as they did. The second emphasises the
accuracy of her choice of the term "responses". Once we strip the
Corowa conference of its mythic status as a popular movement, we can dismiss
"the people" as originators of the specific proposals for federation.
In the referendum campaigns, the voters were reacting to propositions placed
before them by the politicians. In our search for explanation, then, we are
brought back to the motives of the political elite who drove the movement for
federation. Here we encounter yet another of the imponderable challenges for
the historian: how can we identify the reasons for human action?

Why should a handful of
political leaders devote themselves to the cause of something so abstract as
federation? A political scientist struggling to define the concept of
federation was once driven to appeal to an engineer's description of an
aeroplane as a "machine that almost doesn't fly".2 By an
exercise of lateral thought, this may remind us of Lawrence Hargrave, an
engineer himself, who from 1884 onwards doggedly experimented with flying
machines, including steam-powered kites. By 1894 he succeeded in lifting
himself fifteen feet off the ground, but it is generally agreed that Hargrave's
machines slightly exceeded the definition of almost failing to fly. His achievements
as an aviation pioneer are rightly honoured in Australia,
but it remains a mystery that at the very edge of the advanced world - if the citizens of Stanwell Park,
NSW will forgive the description - there should have been an
individual so determined to invent the aeroplane. Can we be any more precise
about the motivations of those who campaigned for its constitutional
equivalent?

In
a general sense, we can tentatively identify the motivation of some of the
individual participants. The ageing Henry Parkes was looking for his place in
history, a conceit cleverly fanned by the governor of New South Wales, Lord
Carrington. Deakin believed that "the desire for fame and for association
with so great a work counted for a great deal among the chief actors".3
George Houston Reid was probably out for the interests of George Houston Reid,
although these did not always coincide with the good health of federation.
Edmund Barton was initially regarded with some suspicion by other campaigners:
he was thought to be lazy and there were suspicions that Toby Tosspot drank
more than was good for him. However, in the last stages of the campaign, Barton
was believed to have sacrificed his legal practice to the cause, and to have
run up a massive £5000 debt.4 Deakin's conversion has been
attributed to his experience of the 1887 Colonial Conference in London where,
as the delegate from Victoria, he was the only Australian representative to
stand up to the British. The explanation of his reason for supporting
federation seems incontrovertible, but the logic of his belief that Australia
should speak with a single voice was less persuasive. What if united Australia
was represented in London, as in time it would be represented, by Robert Gordon
Menzies?5 Since Victoria was the most confident of the Australian
colonies, Deakin might with equal logic have turned his face against federation
in order to guarantee that there would be at least one assertive voice at
imperial gatherings.

With Alfred Deakin, we come
to another problem. Whereas we know far too little about the mental processes
of individual voters, in some respects we may know, or think we know, far too
much about those who shaped the options which the people were asked to endorse.
Our own perceptions also play a role in how we assess the motivation of the
Fathers of Federation. The creation of a united Australian nation is an
achievement that merits our respect. Therefore Alfred Deakin, who contributed
so greatly to its achievement, is deservedly seen as the statesman and visionary
of La Nauze's great biography. But Deakin believed not only in federation but
also in spiritualism, although it is fair to note that his confidence in the
latter waned in parallel with his commitment to the former.6 Should
we regard Deakin's flirtation with the spirits as the eccentric product of an
irrelevant sub-compartment of his brain, or are we forced to confront the
implications of the fact that the same mind could believe in the future that
awaited Australia after federation and the future that beckoned the soul after
death?

An even more remarkable
episode concerns Patrick MacMahon Glynn, whom we have already seen saving the
day at Adelaide in 1897 when he switched sides
to support a draft constitution that would be acceptable to New
South Wales and Victoria.
When the Convention reassembled at Sydney
later that year, Glynn's attention wandered. During a debate on taxation, he
wrote a letter to a young woman from Victoria whom he had only met once, two
years earlier, and bluntly asked her to marry him. If she agreed, "why should we not be married at
once"[?] Writing on a Tuesday, he offered to travel to Melbourne that Friday (no concerns here about
changing trains at Albury), marry her on the Saturday and return immediately.
"This is a lot to ask, but the occasion is my great excuse. I am not my
own master now - we are the servants of the
Nation and its destinies." Happily, the recipient of his letter (it was
the first she had ever received from him) had been thinking on similar lines.
Late the following evening, her telegram of acceptance arrived. (Evidently
federation was not required to improve intercolonial communications.) On
Thursday Glynn warned the Convention of the potential threat from China, before slipping away to catch the
overnight train to Melbourne.
He reappeared a married man on Monday, and just one week after penning his
proposal was able to show off his bride at a glittering ball in Government
House. As a contemporary journalist remarked, Glynn had found a dramatic way of
demonstrating his personal commitment to closer union. "The breakneck
speed with which Glynn got married remains a puzzle," commented his
biographer. The historian not only shares the perplexity, but must face the
awesome implications of the likelihood that Glynn was applying the same mental
processes to the planning of Australia's
future that he had allowed to determine his own.7

Of course, when historians
postulate that railways or racism, industrial conflict or strategic imperatives
"caused" Australian federation, they are engaging in a convenient
shorthand, by which they mean that aspects of these problems impinged upon the
intellects of contemporary opinion-formers to emerge in the form of support for
political union. If we study the movement for federation within the confines of
those practical issues, a logical and persuasive explanatory package may well
emerge. Yet when we encounter those same politicians, the shakers and movers of
Australian federation such as Glynn and Deakin, reaching conclusions about marriage
and death that strike us as irrational, we may begin to doubt the cogency of
their responses in their public sphere. The most that can be said to restore
the assumption of logical causation is that politicians were not required to
submit their decisions to plunge into marriage or their views on the afterlife
to the test of a popular vote. Over 430,000 Australians voted in favour of
federation in the referendums of 1898-99. They cannot all have been the victims
of weird mental processes. Thus, in explanatory terms, we come full circle to
seeking an explanation for the achievement of federation among the people at
large, whose responses we have already concluded were probably irrational and
definitely irrecoverable.

At this point, it may be
illuminating to hearken back to a book published almost a century ago in order
to approach the question of explanation from a wholly different angle, shifting
from individual responses back to the shorthand form of more abstract causes.
When Cephas D. Allin published The Early
Federation Movement of Australia in 1907, he was concerned to account not
for success but to explain failure during an era when "it was only too
manifest that there was no general enthusiasm in favor of a federal
union".8 Allin identified five major reasons for the failure of
federation to make headway before the eighteen-eighties. These were
intercolonial rivalry, the novelty of local self-government, the effectiveness
of informal inter-governmental consultation, the unresolved challenges of internal
separatist movements and the general instability of political leadership in the
various colonies. Allin's fivefold classification merits consideration to
explore the extent to which it might throw comparative light upon the later and
more fruitful campaign that culminated in the establishment of the Commonwealth
of Australia.

Allin identified "the
reciprocal jealousy and suspicion of the colonies" as the "most
insidious and fundamental obstacle to a federal union". He singled out in
particular "the deep-seated ill-will, if not hostility of New South Wales and Victoria". It may be argued that the
angry resentments of the eighteen-fifties were gradually subsiding: Robertson
took his scornful venom against the cabbage garden to the grave in 1891, and
Victorians gradually ceased to celebrate Separation Day in the years that
followed. Yet when Barton led the New South Wales Protectionists in the
election of 1898, Reid's supporters could still run a poster campaign
denouncing him as "bought by Victorian gold".9

Allin linked his emphasis
upon "the spirit of narrow localism" to the love of power fostered by
the recent establishment of responsible government within each colony:
politicians simply did not wish to concede any part of their authority to a central
government. This is inherently plausible, but it would only point to explaining
the subsequent acceptability of federation if we assumed that issues had arisen
by the end of the century which were incapable of resolution within existing
structures. This was the argument for federation advanced by Inglis Clark in
1890, but Clark subsequently turned against
the project. Perhaps the most obvious areas that seemed to call for
Australia-wide supervision were industrial relations and the regulation of
banking. Yet these appear to have intersected with the movement for federation
hesitantly and late in the day. One of the most important expansions in the
governmental activities of the separate colonies during the last two decades of
the nineteenth century was the assumption of responsibility for the
construction and operation of railways. Historians might conclude that this
revolution in communications pointed to the political integration of the whole
continent, but politicians and voters were by no means keen to hand over
control of their local railway networks to a central government that would be
responsive to the demands of their neighbours and rivals.10

The third item on Allin's
explanatory list seems equally inconclusive. "During the early years of
colonial separation," he concluded, "it almost appeared as though the
policy of legislative co-operation would be crowned with success, and that
there would be no need of a federal union." 11 This brings us
back to the conundrum of the Federal Council: was it a success that paved the
way to closer union, or a failure that rendered political centralisation
inevitable? His fourth argument is little more convincing, even in its own
terms. Allin argued that continuing movements for separation within the
colonies tended to nullify any chance of bringing about an all-embracing
federal government. It was certainly true that secessionist movements were
vocal in north Queensland and the Riverina,
and even in western Victoria and northern Tasmania. Yet after the
separation of Queensland in 1859, there was
little likelihood that any major chunk
of eastern Australia
would win the ear of the British government and be allowed to set up for
itself. Of course, this did not discourage separatist movements in Queensland and Western
Australia from pursuing their campaigns. Separation
complicated federation but it did not necessarily rule it out. Indeed, it might
provide a face-saving cover for the disruption of existing jurisdictions, just
as the Dominion of Canada had offered a way out of the tensions between Ontario and Quebec
in the Canadian Union. (Similarly, some forecasters suggest that the European
Union may offer a painless cover for a twenty-first century dissolution of the United Kingdom.)
Parkes had coupled his crusade for federation with the prediction that the six
separate colonies would eventually fracture and regroup into ten member States.12

The fifth and last of
Allin's explanations seems at first the most humdrum, but it may offer an
important comparative clue to understanding the role of political leadership in
the eighteen-nineties. In the earlier period, "provincial politics were as
restless and unstable as the sea". Rapid changes in the personnel of
colonial ministries complicated "the practical difficulty of securing
simultaneous action in the different colonies".13 By contrast,
the eighteen-nineties saw a relative degree of stability that gave a cohort of
colonial leaders enough time to develop the experience of working together for
a common end. However, the comparison can be exaggerated. The politicians of
the eighteen-nineties remained partisan rivals. Some, like Nelson in Queensland, used their
local ascendancy to block federation. The leader who exercised the greatest
dominance over his own patch was Forrest in Western Australia, who later
claimed that only two of his 25 supporters in the local Assembly were
enthusiastic for federation.14 His ascendancy over his followers was
awesome, but it ran counter to Allin's second argument that politicians who had
recently acquired extensive power under responsible government (conceded to
Western Australia only in 1890) were reluctant to consider sharing it. In any
case, although cabinets had come and gone in earlier decades, outward
instability had often disguised a high degree of continuity among personnel, as
in New Zealand's
"Continuous Ministry". To elevate Allin's fifth cause of failure into
a comparative explanation for the eventual success of federation, it would be
necessary to explain why politicians of the eighteen-nineties rallied to the
cause of federation, when their predecessors in the days of factional
instability had resisted all temptation to re-group around so potentially
convenient a unifying issue.

As it happens, Deakin's
narrative offers a clue that may explain the different atmosphere of the
eighteen-nineties. He accepted that both politicians and voters were chiefly
moved by "the prospect of financial gain". Yet behind this narrow
sentiment stood an "enthusiasm for union without which the merely selfish
energy would have died down and disappeared many times". This was a
sentiment that "swayed all to some extent but was the dominating factor
only among the young, the imaginative, and those whose patriotism was
Australian or Imperial". If Deakin was correct, we can identify here a
driving force that was simultaneously real and inchoate, a feeling that was
"the mainspring of the whole movement and its constant motive power".15
It is not necessarily to be found in campaigning organisations. In New South Wales, for instance,
the Australasian Federal League has been described as "a mirror of the
federal movement rather than its driving force". Even its own members
"played no significant part in its activities" and its sole venture
in supporting a propagandist newspaper collapsed after twelve issues.16 Yet
whatever form it took, the sentiment was sufficient to force a backslider like
George Reid to maintain his federalist credentials. The bedrock of
pro-federation opinion described by Deakin does not easily fit into any of the
explanatory categories explored in earlier sections. If the focus of its
patriotism was either Australian or imperial, it can hardly represent an
exclusive form of nationalism, and still less of nativism. Indeed, Deakin more
or less dismissed any notion of motivation by special interest. "With the
majority, the emotion was its own reward and the ideal its own sufficient
attraction".17

Deakin was writing in
September 1900, when supporters of federation might be forgiven a certain
romanticisation of the dawning of their new day. Modern commentators might
suspect that the high-mindedness of the sentiment he described represented yet
another form of concealment. Such qualities of unselfish patriotism sound
classically middle-class in their nature: were they simply a cloak to disguise
a policy designed to reinforce a threatened social order? The suspicion is
intellectually legitimate, but as a contribution to an overall explanation, it
may be misplaced. Rather, the inchoate but persistent nature of the public
sentiment in favour of federation may simply reflect an opaque assessment of
its immediate and practical effect. Surveying the progress of the federal cause
throughout the eighteen-nineties, Norris drew an important conclusion, one so
obvious that its implications tend to be overlooked. The movement for
federation, he remarked, "became apolitical". In some respects, the
adjective is inappropriate for, as Norris goes on to point out, support was
attracted from the opposite ends of the political spectrum. Progressives
endorsed federation in the hope of advancing enlightened legislation;
reactionaries embraced it as a safeguard against radical change. "Support
for federation, and opposition to it, cut across normal political
allegiances."18 Indeed, as Norris points out, two of the most
prominent South Australian federalists hated each other with such venom that
one of them had once toted a gun on the streets of Adelaide, hoping to shoot the other.

To combine Deakin's
description of solid community support with the analysis by Norris of an
apparently confused cross-party endorsement of federation is to establish a new
starting point for historical analysis. The challenge of explanation shifts
from a search for specific causes to an attempt to discover why a major project
for constitutional restructuring was capable of attracting such broad support,
and especially how it managed to impose itself upon the Australian political
agenda in the late eighteen-nineties, given that it had conspicuously failed to
break through at any previous point in time. In some respects, federation had
become a "Teflon" issue, invulnerable to harm from the very issues
which doubters had feared would overwhelm it. It simply strolled around the
fiscal lion when the free trade question crossed its path. Despite the
middle-class tone of its most active supporters, it cruised to victory in
referendum after referendum in colonies with large and self-conscious working
class voting populations. Yet, equally and remarkably, federation became a rolling
political snowball, its apolitical character enabling it not merely to adjust
to new issues but to take them aboard comfortably and without sacrifice to its
central objective. In 1891, few thought about State regulation of industrial
disputes or the extension of the vote to women. By 1897-98, federalists were
almost absent-minded in their acceptance of the possibility of experimenting
with the first and apparently resigned to the eventual concession of the
second.

There may be a useful clue
to be pondered in that very notion of "eventual" developments. Norris
rightly rebuked Blainey for confusing what happened after federation with what
people expected to happen. In his own discussion of the subject, Norris linked
the before and the after, establishing, for instance, that defence did not
feature prominently in the federalist discourse of the eighteen-nineties, just
as it was slow to emerge as a priority in the early years of the Commonwealth.19
Yet, although methodologically impressive, his analysis may perhaps be
defective in assuming that the effectiveness of causal hypotheses should be
measured in terms of their relevance to a near future rather than one that
proved to be more distant. Of course, it remains reasonable to contend that a
level of government that took eight years even to start building warships can
hardly be said to have been established with naval defence as its most urgent
imperative. Still, it would be a nonsense to attribute precision to past
expectation, to insist that voters in 1898 supported federation because they
required that a navy be established by 1903 or a railway across the Nullabor
constructed by 1905. People may have firm perceptions of future possibilities
but it would be unreasonable to expect that they could have possessed exact
foreknowledge of a timetable.

It is in this light that we
should consider statements like that by Sir John Cockburn in 1901:

The day of small independent
nations is passing away; stagnant states are doomed to disappear, existing
empires are destined to grow still larger; all must expand or submit to
absorption. In federation lies the safe middle course between dangerous
isolation and unwieldy empire. Federation consigns the precious jewel of
autonomy into joint safe keeping.20

In terms of historical explanation of the standard
"A caused B" variety, Cockburn's comment is so general that it is
tempting to dismiss it as merely vacuous, nothing more than a simplistic
conflation of received notions from Darwin on evolution and Bryce on
federalism. However, for the perplexed citizen asked to vote Yes or No on a
specific proposal for continental union, such arguments may have seemed more
persuasive, simply because they shifted the focus of decision away from the
murky arithmetic of immediate gain and loss towards the more inspirational
distant horizon. Once voters shifted mental gear to that longer-term vision,
federation became both plausible and irresistible. Hence the importance of
George Reid's insistence in 1898 on imposing a ten-year limit upon the Braddon
clause. At the time of the 1898 referendum, one Tasmanian noted "great
searchings of heart" among "thoughtful men" (and, no doubt, if
our Hobart
versifier is to be believed, thoughtful women as well). They listened to the
warnings of the No camp and accepted "that Federation was in many respects
a leap in the dark", but they recoiled from the alternative of staying
out. "We realised that Federation must come - that it was an absolute
necessity for Australia
- & if the plunge had to be made, it had
better be made at once."21 The secret of the success of the
federation movement, at least through the ballot box, lay in the fact that its
proponents managed to elide the long-term with the immediate, through a slight
of hand that combined the sense of inevitability with the threat of
now-or-never.

Once
we approach the question of explanation in this light, the problem to be solved
is not simply how federation managed to move into the ideological middle ground
but how it captured the agenda of Australian politics. Redefining the issue in
this way helps to focus the causal analysis, but only at the expense of
reminding us of the inadequacy of historical methodology. By ceasing to require
federation to have operated as an immediate panacea, we may begin to understand
how it could be seen as a plausible response to the insecurities generated by
the crises of the 'nineties. It is possible to give a narrative account of the
way in which the politicians, or most of them, rallied behind the issue as that
frightening decade rumbled on, so much so that by 1898, a great deal of time
and effort and ego had been invested in its promotion. But we are still left
wondering why federation became the most generally endorsed way forward for Australia's
people and politicians, and in all six colonies. No doubt
"thoughtful" Tasmanians were wise to seize an opportunity that might
never again be offered to them on such favourable terms, but that does not in
itself tell us why the equally thoughtful voters of New South Wales reached the
same conclusion, if less emphatically.

Federation had long provided
a plausible framework for Australia's
future, but it was not until 1898 that it came to dominate the current
political agenda. As L.F. Crisp once commented, there was "no Damascus Road
miracle about Australia's
federal conversion."22 It
is conventional for historians to look to the evidence of contemporaries for
explanations of their own achievements, but those who propelledfederation to the centre of the
political agenda found their own success as remarkable as subsequent scholars
have found it puzzling. Bernhard Wise chose to confine his definition of the
movement to the eleven years that began with the Tenterfield speech, but even
within this truncated period, he insisted that events were reviewed, "the
cause of wonder will be, rather that Federation was achieved at all, and not
that its advent was delayed!"23 "To those who have watched
its inner workings", wrote Alfred Deakin in 1900, "its actual
accomplishment must always appear to have been secured by a series of
miracles".24 A century after the achievement of Australia
federation, its explanation remains a challenge to historians. There can be
little doubt that the obstacles lie not in the history of Australia, and
most emphatically, the problem cannot be blamed upon the scholarly work of
those who have studied this vast and intriguing topic. Rather, it lies in the
nature of historical explanation itself.

Posterity should guard
against the glib pretence of understanding against which Deakin warned a
century ago. "All History takes on the appearance of inevitableness after
the event. Looking backward the future will be tempted to say that Australian
Union was Australia's destiny from the first and that nothing could have prevented
its consummation."25 "Che
sera, sera: whatever will be, will be": words that are reassuring in a
popular song become more than a little humiliating when adopted as scholarly
analysis.

One defence against the
circular relationship of assumption and proof that has characterised the
hypotheses seeking to account for Australian federation may perhaps be to test
them in the New Zealand
context. Is it possible to understand why incentives assumed to have proved
persuasive to Australians failed to appeal to their fellow-colonists twelve
hundred miles to the east? New
Zealand's historians have indeed made the
attempt, and their arguments merit study. Unfortunately, this is not to claim
that their debate has clarified the picture on either side of the Tasman.

ENDNOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

ADB:Australian Dictionary of Biography

Bennett: Scott
Bennett, ed., Federation (Melbourne, 1975)

CHBE
(Aust): J.Holland Rose, ed., Cambridge History of the British
Empire:

vol. 7, part 1: Australia
(Cambridge
1933)

CHBE (NZ): J.Holland
Rose, ed., Cambridge History of the British
Empire:

Scholefield: G.H.
Scholefield, ed., A Dictionary of New Zealand
Biography

(2 vols, Wellington, 1940)

Speeches
and Documents:

W.D. McIntyre
and W.J. Gardner, eds,

Speeches and Documents on New Zealand
History

(Oxford, 1971)

Wise, Bernhard R. Wise, The Making of the Australian
Commonwealth 1889-1900: A Stage in the
Growth of the British Empire (London,
1913)

ENDNOTES

Three Mega-Explanations: Nationalism, Defence and
Race

1. Norris, Emergent Commonwealth
(full citation under Abbreviations).

2. "A factor - outside mathematics and trading stations and
Scottish estates - is a meaningless piece of tired jargon. Events
are not the products of simple causes of complex situations ... but this does not
mean they are produced by factors. A word to be forgotten." G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (Sydney, 1967), p. 101.

3. But Symon was speaking in August 1895, when the
federal cause was at a low ebb. Crowley,
Documents, pp. 458-59.

3. Cf. Macintyre, Concise History, p. 144. Supporting federation in 1898, a
commission of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Victoria hoped "that ultimately some adequate
provision will be made by the Federal Parliament for the highest well-being of
the aboriginal people of Australia,
so long as the aborigines continue in existence". Although a paternalist
smoothing of the pillow of a dying race, such an expression of concern was rare
in the federation debate, and goes some way to contradicting the hard-nosed
stereotypes sometimes attributed to Australia's Scots. Argus, 5 May 1898, Bennett, p. 49.

20. R.M. Crawford, "A Bit of a Rebel": The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood
(Sydney, 1975), pp. 187-231; Nettie Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins: A Memoir (London, 1931), pp.161-64.
The campaign against Wood was led by a graduate of Edinburgh
University, James Inglis, a local
merchant and former New South Wales
education minister. Inglis had celebrated the British
empire in a series of works, including Tentlife in Tigerland and Oor
Ain Folk. One of Wood's defenders called the campaign for his dismissal
"sheer barbarism, worthy only of the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition, or
of the Scotch Presbyterians of the 18th century".

39. Edwards to Parkes, 24 January 1890, in Norris, Emergent Commonwealth,
p. 111. A contemporary writer inverted cause and effect, declaring in 1890 that
war with China
"would be the greatest blessing we could possibly receive" since it
would compel immediate federation, not to mention deportation of "every
yellow alien in our midst". R. Thomson, Australian Nationalism (1880), Clark,
Documents, p. 794.

49. La Nauze,
Deakin, ii, p. 517. Reporting to the governor-general a debate in the House
of Representatives on the Defence Bill in August 1900, Barton noted that
"many members are at a loss to account for the absence of any prominent
provisions as to naval matters. ... But how imprudent it would have been to
attempt to deal with Naval Defence at this stage!" Hopetoun MSS, 1629/8,
Barton to Hopetoun, 1 August [1901].

50. In a centenary salute from Scotland, it is appropriate to mention that Australia's first warships were built at Fairfield's and John Brown's on the Clyde.

51. Norris, Emergent Commonwealth,
p. 65. Deakin's statement is widely quoted, e.g. CHBE (Aust), p. 500; Manning Clark, Short History of Australia, pp. 172-73; Crawford, Australia, p. 129; Norris, Emergent Commonwealth, p. 44; McLachlan,
Waiting for the Revolution, p. 172.
La Nauze, Deakin, i, pp. 277-83
offers a thoughtful defence against the charge of racism, but silently
separates the 1901 Immigration Restriction Bill from the issue of the causes of
federation. Helen Irving has challenged Norris's argument, claiming that
"the lack of urgency attached to the matter ... is only persuasive as
evidence of the wider political culture is overlooked". But the point can
be argued either way: other endemic aspects of the political culture featured
more prominently in the arguments for federation. Irving,
To Constitute a Nation, p. 100 and cf. pp. 100-18.

52. CHBE
(Aust), p. 500.

53. Norris, Emergent Commonwealth,
p. 77.

54. Norris, Emergent Commonwealth,
pp. 54-55.

55. Bennett, p. 175. I am grateful to Mrs Pat
Crichton, Archivist of Hopetoun House, for information about the opening
ceremony of the first Commonwealth Parliament.

2. Brisbane test matches are of course famous for bad
weather, but tests were not played in Brisbane
until 1928.

3. Bennett, p. 181; Reeves, State Experiments, i, p. 179.

4. La Nauze, Making,
pp. 208-11.

5. Don Wright, "The River Murray: Microcosm of Australian Federal
History", Federalism, pp.
277-89. Disagreements over the Murray River
trade, including the collection and apportionment of customs duties, had
contributed to the failure of proposals for federation in 1856-57. Ward, Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies,
pp. 395-426.

6. N.J. Brown, Federation
of the Colonies (1884), Crowley,
Documents, p. 148. Brown's pamphlet
was based on an address delivered in the Town Hall at Hobart, where railway communication could add
only marginally to the attractions of federation. "Railways and telegraphs
had been quietly bringing the colonies into closer touch and increasing the
impatience felt with tariff partitions", according to Pember Reeves, State Experiments, i, p. 149. See also
the article by K.T. Livingston, "Anticipating Federation", cited
above.

7. G. Blainey, The
Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne,
1966), p. 242.

8. Trainor, British
Imperialism and Australian Nationalism, pp. 120-28. Cf. P.J. Cain and A.G.
Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation
and Expansion 1688-1914 (London,
1993), pp. 250-51. The overseas telegraph also affected Melbourne's role as an entrepot. Agents
trading in imported goods no longer needed expensive warehousing to maintain
large stocks against possible surges in demand. Rapid and reliable steamship
services made it possible for small retailers to by-pass local wholesale
merchants and import direct from abroad. In a general sense, these developments
lay behind Melbourne's campaign to extend its
economic influence within Australia
and the nearby Pacific region. Davison, Marvellous
Melbourne, pp. 20-24.

9. K.S. Inglis, The
Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History 1788-1870 (Melbourne, 1974), pp.
145-46.

14. So Garran told a parliamentary committee in 1930,
Crisp, Australian National Government,
p. 2. Shaw was one of the first historians to express scepticism about the
alleged inconvenience of colonial boundaries, Story of Australia, p. 182.

15. Blainey, Tyranny
of Distance, pp. 251-53. Blainey points out that far worse inconvenience
should have been expected in Sydney and Melbourne, since In
neither city was there a rail link between the central station and the docks.

19. For a useful outline account of labour unrest, de
Garis in Crowley,
New History, pp. 229-33.

20. Irving, To Constitute
a Nation, p. 213. There are
several versions of the Cardinal's warning. Wise, p. 222, claims to be taken
from a contemporary press report. For E.W. O'Sullivan's criticism of a
"swells' movement", see HSSA,
p. 163.

21. Alistair Davidson, The Invisible State: The Formation of the Australian State
1788-1901 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 230-39, and p. xii for
the influence of Gramsci. That federation was not the central focus of
Davidson's analysis seems confirmed by his allusions to "Andrew"
Barton and "John" Garran.

22. Wise, p. 221.

23. de Garis, Crowley,
New History, p. 233.

24. Loveday et al., eds, Emergence of the Australian Party System, pp. 186-91.

27. Clark, The
People Make Laws, p. 66. Pember Reeves made a similar connection, both with
trade union militancy and the irruption of Labor as an electoral force.
"Unquestionably many middle-class politicians turned to Federation as a
counter-attraction, and thought to find in it a steadying influence."
There is always good reason to suspect that any historical statement beginning
with the word "unquestionably" is short on actual evidence. The
sentiment was precisely what we might expect from a pioneer Fabian socialist.
Reeves, State Experiments, i, p. 150.

28. Davidson, Invisible State,
p. 234.

29. Trainor, British
Imperialism and Australian Nationalism, p. 139.

30. Garran, Prosper
the Commonwealth, p. 115.

31. La Nauze, Making,
p. 102.

32. La Nauze, Making,
p. 207. Forrest's ascendancy over the narrow world of Westralian politics was
awesome. When he attended the 1897 Convention, he left his colony in the hands
of acting premier E.H. Wittenoom, who was strictly enjoined not to take any
major decision on his own authority. Wittenoom was soon reprimanded for
attempting to issue mining regulations on his own authority and for making an
unsuitable legal appointment. Soon afterwards, a ship docked bearing a
passenger with smallpox. The chastened Wittenoom telegraphed Forrest for
instructions. Federal Story, p. 175.

33. Garran, Prosper
the Commonwealth, p. 116.

34. Bennett, pp. 90-92; Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins, pp. 151-57.

35. Clark, The
People Make Laws, p. 67. The ever-sensible Shaw points out that "the
working class did not always follow its leaders". In May 1899, admittedly
late in the day, Sydney
trades unionists formed a committee to support the amended Federation Bill.
Shaw, Story of Australia, p. 190;
R.N. Ebbels, ed., The Australian Labor
Movement 1850-1907 (Melbourne, 1965 ed.), p. 228.

36. Cockburn, Australian
Federation, passim.

37. Crisp, Australian National Government, pp. 15-16;
D.W. Rawson, "Victoria" in Loveday et al., eds, Emergence of the Australian Party System, pp. 47-48.

Economic Motives: Banking, Investment and Trade

1. de Garis in Crowley,
New History, pp. 218-19.

2. de Garis in Crowley,
New History, pp. 221-23.

3. Norris, Emergent Commonwealth,
p. 50.

4. Cain and Hopkins,
British Imperialism, p. 252, and pp.
3-52 for their general theory. For thoughtful critiques, Andrew Porter,
"'Gentlemanly Capitalism' and Empire: The British Experience since
1750?", Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 18 (1990), pp. 265-95 and "Gentlemen,
Capitalists, and the British Empire", ibid., 22 (1994), pp. 531-41.

5. Clark, Short
History of Australia,
p. 173. The Short History was
"based on material collected for the book of documents" (ibid., p.
7). However, the only hint of the argument in Clark, Documents seems to a quotation from James Service in 1893:
"from almost Torres Strait down to Adelaide
you will find the Commercial Bank everywhere" (p. 305). This does not in
itself suggest that high finance required federation to overcome colonial borders.
Reeves thought that the bank panic of 1893 generated "a somewhat vague but
general notion that Federation would somehow strengthen the public
credit". Reeves, State Experiments,
i, p. 150.

6. La Nauze, Deakin,
i, p. 188; Federal Story, p. 162.
Deakin, so inflexible on the issue in 1900, had taken a very different line
writing in a private letter to Lord Hopetoun in 1897. "I have never yet
spoken a word in favour of the abolition of the right of appeal to the Privy
Council though I have always voted that way .... If it be included in the
Commonwealth Bill & if the Imperial Government omit this part of it I doubt
if there would be any real complaint". Deakin and Barton would have
accepted a single court of appeal for the whole Empire, replacing the parallel
but separate systems for Britain
and the colonies. Hopetoun MSS, B1621/2, Deakin to Hopetoun, 20 August 1897; Federal Story, p. 158.

7. Wise, p. 186.

8. HSSA, pp. 152-98. The original articles were
published in 1949-50. By 1953, further contributions had been made by John
Bastin (on Western Australia)
and A.W. Martin (on the New Federation movement), HSSA, pp. 199-225. The debate then fell silent until the
publication of Essays in 1969, in
which the Parker thesis was challenged by R. Norris (for South
Australia) and Patricia Hewett (for south-eastern New South Wales), Essays, pp. 137-186.

10. South Australian Register, 15 April 1898, Bennett, p. 129. It was left to
one of the few women campaigners, Maybanke Wolstenholme, to make the point that
even business partnerships, let alone marriages, required something more than
mere legal agreements to make them work. Irving, To Constitute a Nation, p. 198.

11. Blainey, HSSA, p. 185. Textbook emphasis upon the
Corowa conference may obscure a similar problem on the New
South Wales side of the Murray.
It is worth noting that Lyne, a determined opponent of federation, represented
Hume, an electorate close to the border.

15. Blainey, HSSA,
pp. 189-90. It is not clear whether the Germans of the Darling Downs opposed
federation on ethnic grounds or because they were wheat farmers and felt
threatened by New South Wales
competition. D. Waterson, Squatter,
Selector, and Storekeeper: A History of the Darling Downs (Sydney, 1968), pp. 134, 192, appears to place
one district, Cambooya, under both categories of explanation.

3. Tasmanian
Mail, 28 May 1898, Bennett, p.
58. See, more generally, H. Irving, ed.,"Fair
Federalists and Founding Mothers" in Irving,
ed.,A Woman's Constitution?, pp. 1-20, and Irving,
To Constitute a Nation, pp. 171-95. The latter supplies more male
chauvinist verse at p. 180 and, at p. 193, the claim by a woman writer to have
met "a well-educated and very intelligent girl" who asked, in 1900,
"What is Federation?"

4. Reid sent a copy of the Bill to every New South Wales voter,
and a special issue of the Sydney Daily
Telegraph advocating a No vote was also distributed free of charge.
Bennett, p. 173; McLachlan, Waiting for
the Revolution, p. 173.

14. Bennett, pp. 18-20 for a discussion of the
reasons for the turn-out.

The Problem of Historical Explanation

1. Hewett, Essays,
p. 183. An early environmentalist, John Clarke, came out against the Bill in
1898 because federation offered no constitutional protection for native animals
and plants. A federationist newspaper dismissed the complaint, in a sarcastic
pun, as a "floorer". Irving, To Constitute a Nation, pp. 128-32.

5. Bennett, p. 145; La Nauze, Deakin, i, p. 184. In 1884, New
Zealand's Sir George Grey had opposed participation on
parallel grounds: New
Zealand would lose its distinctive voice in
imperial voice in imperial matters if it had to speak through a Federal
Council. K. Sinclair, "Why New Zealanders are not Australians: New
Zealanders and the Australian Federation Movement, 1881-1901" in K.
Sinclair, ed, Tasman Relations: New Zealand and Australia,
1788-1988 (Auckland,
1988), p. 100.

7. G. O'Collins, Patrick
MacMahon Glynn: A Founder of Australian Federation (Melbourne, 1965), pp. 125-29. "Slight
small pale large nose reddish bald jockey" was Deakin's description of
Glynn. Perhaps he was well advised to propose marriage at long range? Federal Story, p. 176.

8. Allin, Early
Federation Movement, p. 415. According to Ward, Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies, p. 46, Australians
"found plenty of reasons for believing that federation was desirable, but
none for believing that it was indispensable".